BeagleBone Black

Images Available

The Goal

The goal of this site is to provide easy to deploy stock armhf embedded images that are very stable. The goal is not to provide the absolute latest kernels that may lack stability. This ease of deployment and stability enables the software engineer to focus on software development without the hassles of building operating systems and fussing with bleeding-edge kernel issues.

Ubuntu Trusty 14.04

This image uses the Ubuntu 14.04 core filesystem from Ubuntu with the minimal meta package applied. The kernel is compiled from the mainline Linux kernel git repository. The result is an easy-to-install and stable Linux image that works with both the BeagleBone and the BeagleBone Black boards.

Ubuntu Precise 12.04.4 LTS

This image uses the Ubuntu 12.04 core filesystem from Ubuntu with the minimal meta package applied. The kernel is compiled from the mainline Linux kernel git repository. The result is an easy-to-install and stable Linux image that works with both the BeagleBone and the BeagleBone Black boards.

Debian Wheezy 7.5

This image is based on the Debian Wheezy 7.5 core filesystem from Live-Build, with packages equivalent to the Ubuntu minimal meta package. The kernel is compiled from the mainline Linux kernel git repository. The result is an easy-to-install and stable Linux image that works with both the BeagleBone and the BeagleBone Black boards.

All software is provided “AS IS,” and any expressed or implied warranties, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular or any purpose are hereby expressly disclaimed. Any and all liability for any damage or loss resulting from the failure, defect, malfunction, use, or misuse of any software product offered is hereby expressly disclaimed. If you have any doubt at all about this software or Linix, do not download this software.

Marvin Stuart

Worked no issues, Great Job.. would it be possible to create an image that include the ubuntu desktop

Guest

Great Job had no issue installing, would it be possible to create an img with Ubuntu desktop

armhf

You bet — I have that on my TODO list for pre-packaged images. I believe it may be as simple as apt-get install ubuntu-desktop but I have yet to try it.

rgsheehan

Hello all,
Following is a copy of a request I have been placing around the net about problems I am having with my new BBBlack. No luck with any response so far. Could anybody here help? If so, thanks.

First time Beagler, coming back to Linux after a long
absence. So, I plug in my new board using the USB cable, and I can
point FireFox to the onboard webserver fine. When I try to run any of
the bonescript stuff, I get a message like the following: “Exception:
Please perform setTargetAddress on a valid target”. I did type in the
default ip address in the box at the top of the page (with label: Did you know? This page can interact with your BeagleBone -Type
in your BeagleBone’s IP address here) but no luck. So I tried
disconnecting the USB and plugging the board into my LAN, it got a IP
address automatically and I was able to (finally…, couldn’t get Ubuntu
12.04 to show me what other hosts were on my network) browse to the
board over the network but still got the same error. Thanks for any
help anybody can provide on this.

Brandon Fowler

I had some issues with this for some hours trying different builds with 12.10 and 13.04 installing gnome with video issues. Found that Ubuntu will install all available xserver-xorg-video-“drivers” and by default chooses the “omapfb” driver. If you “sudo apt-get install gnome-core”, then reboot into terminal and edit xorg.conf (ctrl+alt+F1) and replace the line listing “omapfb” (driver) with “fbdev”. Then reboot or startx. Fixed it for me.

My issue now is that even when manually configuring the kernel to include SPI support it still hasn’t worked.

Dave Allen

I tried it. This Ubuntu image is a minimal install, and is sized to allow it to fit on the emmc chip on the board. So, it is too small to allow installation of desktop. I’m going to try resizing it on a larger SD card.

It sure would be nice if one of you experts would prep a ready-to-go image for a 4 or 8GB SD card that we could copy with WinDiskImag32.

Dave Allen

I tried using Puppy Linux’s partition manager to expand the partition on the microSD card.

I installed ubuntu-desktop (no errors) and rebooted. Desktop staggers to its feet with the screen jumping around. It manages to ask me for a password. If I move the mouse the screen jumps wildly. If I type in the password the desktop is replaced by a splash screen but no icons or bars or anything. If I move the mouse the pointer appears and moves but very soon the whole thing locks up with the BBB user LED 2 on solid. No heartbeat. Nothing to do but reboot. Four reboots with same results.

I can go into a tty while desktop is waiting for a password. TTY works fine. No problems at the command line.

Please help.

armhf

You can partition the storage yourself making at least 32MB FAT and bootable for p1 and remainder for p2, then unpack the tar files directly to them. They can be found on the download page, but you’ll need Linux to do this. I am going to post how to increase the size of a running file system to take up all of the space on the disk. It is actually pretty easy.

armhf

the username is ubuntu and the password is also ubuntu

Dmitry Grinberg

the issue is not moving mouse – it is GFX driver. you can make it hang every time by moving a mouse over an updating window. for example run xeyes and move mouse over it. it will hang quickly. and hangs well. kernel stops working alltogether, no crash no nothing, just hang. i am attempting to build a custom kernel and get powerVR graphics driver to work in hopes that it works better than this. i’ll report if and when i manage this.

armhf

You may also want to report / discuss Kernel issues and your findings with Robert Nelson on his wiki. I am reusing his kernels at this point to build these prepackaged images.

Robert Nelson answered that the 3.8 kernel used ” very early version of Rob Clark’s KMS based tilcdc driver.”

So, the solution will be to get an appropriate xorg driver for the TI chip.

Justin Rogers

Really appreciate the updated 13.04 image. Installs very easily and boots right up. Any tips on how to deal with the eMMC drive? I seem to be able to run the scripts that are out there, but no luck booting from the eMMC.

NYsolutions

Anyway to set the Beaglebone black to autoboot to sd, without holding the button every time?

armhf

I have not done a deep dive yet, but it isn’t as simple as it finding MLO in the boot partition as it the case with booting SD. I sized these .img files with the intent of having them copied straight to the on-board eMMC, but they won’t boot. I believe the eMMC image must be bootstrapping into an unformatted area of the first partition. The only way I know how to get it going at the moment now is to copy the files to the existing partitions. I have put the Angstrom image on the downloads page incase anyone blew away their eMMC experimenting (like I did) and needs to go back.

It is a priority of mine to get this working by default, so check back in about a week.

armhf

Today’s 5/9 Ubuntu Raring 13.04 image will now do this if you apply it to the internal eMMC. It first checks to see if a card is in the SD slot and tries to boot it, then boots the internal eMMC otherwise.

NYsolutions

New image from 5/9 runs fine off the SD, however when trying to copy the image to SD using script listed here http://eewiki.net/display/linuxonarm/BeagleBone+Black it throws an error sed: -e expression #1, char 16: unterminated `s’ command. Although your image from last week copies over perfectly.

http://twitter.com/eduardoA Eduardo Moya

a problem with this new review … if I connect the network cable … shutdown

armhf

After it is booted? I am not able to reproduce this. I am about to link a new raring .img based on Robert Nelson’s 3.8.12-bone17 kernel. Let me know if you still see it then.

armhf

If you download the file to the bone while booted from SD (wget http://s3.armhf.com/debian/raring/bone/ubuntu-13.04-armhf-minfs-3.8.12-bone17.img.xz) you can just copy it straight to eMMC (xz -cd ubuntu-13.04-armhf-minfs-*.img.xz > /dev/mmcblk1) without the using Robert’s copy script. Don’t forget to power-down and remove the SD.

Mato

I try to install ubuntu on BBB with steps described in http://www.armhf.com/index.php/boards/beaglebone-black/ but no succsess. I downloaded an Ubuntu .img.xz file, write it to a microSD card, please what is next? Distro Angstrom has no apt-get, so no command apt-get insatall xz-utils can be used. I want to install ubuntu on internal eMMC. Sorry I am new in Linux.

armhf

Running Ubuntu in an emulator like VirtualBox makes a lot of tasks easier. Is this an option for you?

Great work! But looks this image took much more time to boot-up(get the login prompt) than default angstrom distribution. Is this normal?

armhf

It looks like my Angstrom is about 12.6 seconds to boot, and by Ubuntu is 15.1 seconds. Type ‘dmesg’ to see the kernel log and timings.

armhf

opkg install xz

http://twitter.com/eduardoA Eduardo Moya

yes, after booted… Later I’ll try and comment…

Justin Rogers

I have a uSD with one version of 13.04, copied over this new .xz and applied the image directly to the eMMC. It’s working great, has a light footprint, and plenty of room for a lot of use cases. Thanks very much for this image.

http://twitter.com/eduardoA Eduardo Moya

Like the previous … if connector plugged … shutdown … without connector starts without problems …

Let’s break apart the steps then. The image is compressed, so lets decompress the .img.zx into an .img alone. Just run xz -d ubuntu-13.04-armhf-minfs-3.8.12-bone17.img.xz and after a long time, it should be a nearly 2 GB ubuntu-13.04-armhf-minfs-3.8.12-bone17.img file (notice the missing .xz). Try applying the uncompressed image to the raw device: cat ubuntu-13.04-armhf-minfs-3.8.12-bone17.img > /dev/mmcblk1 (Since you say you are booted from SD, the block device to the eMMC will be /dev/mmcblk1)

If you haven’t read it yet, this covers the block devices in more detail:

Can you do other things that only the root user can do? What does whoami tell you?

# whoami
root

http://www.facebook.com/richard.dollet Richard Dollet

Right, sudo works fine (shutdown command for example). whomami return ubuntu when logged as ubuntu and root when sudo-ing. Looks like /dev/mmcblk1 is locked. What’s strange too, is that when I use sudo, it doesn’t even bother asking for the password, and returns the permission error right away.

I’ve been able to upgrade back and forth the different Angstrom distro. I just can execute this command. I’m certainly missing something trivial.

http://twitter.com/eduardoA Eduardo Moya

yes, it’s what I’ve done. It worked at first. :)… with the last image of Ubuntu

That worked !!! Enjoying your amazing from the eMMc now. Thanks a bunch !

http://christopherbaker.net/ Christopher Baker

Hi John, can you offer any tips on getting the libgles1/libgles2/libgl libraries installed? I have your Ubuntu 13.04 image installed, but can’t seem to find the right packages … I believe that this must be driven by the sgx drivers, but I’m not sure exactly how to get support for this in your image — more info here: http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu#SGX_Video_Acceleration

Thanks!

Christopher

armhf

I purge the package cache before building the image — did you apt-get update first?

Thanks for the work on this so far. I have just got lubuntu-core on a 12.10 image booting to the desktop. It is very flickery among other problems. Also got your 13.04 image running.

What I am interested in for another application is Ubuntu Server 12.04.2 on the BBB. I have a handful of the original BeagleBones running Ubuntu Server 12.04.2 and wanted mainly take advantage of the extra processing/RAM and also the lower power consumption/price of the BBB. Been trying to jump from LTS release to LTS release and onto the ones in-between only for testing purposes.

I am attempting to get the ubuntu-12.04-r9-minimal-armhf-2012-11-29.tar.xz image onto the BBB but have been unsuccessful so far.

Hi John, I’m using Debian Wheezy for BBB and want to use a telnet connection to the BBB, but unfortunately after passing the login name the connection is closed. Why?

armhf

Are you using ubuntu as the userid? I built the Debian image to use debian as the user id: ssh debian@debian-armhf

Simon Bella

Hi John,
A masterful piece of work indeed! I have booted Ubuntu Raring 13.04 from uSD card and this works really great!
I have now installed lighttpd and php packages which I would like to include before I write the final image to eMMC. Can you tell me if there is a way I can write my expanded & updated system to the internal eMMC flash for direct booting? I am not sure how to go about this procedure or whether it will fit into the 2GB eMMC – can you outline what needs to be done – thanks again.

http://www.facebook.com/critico.allesklar Critico Allesklar

after booting debian wheezy 7.0.0 everything seems normal, but I cant login using putty (kicks me out after entering user debian) or winSCP where the password and/or user seem to be wrong – do you still use debian/debian ? What else could be the reason for the problem?

Simon Bella

After installing Ubuntu Raring on eMMC flash and booting from there I can no longer access or see a uSD card when inserted – it doesn’t show up when you dir /dev ? On boot the internal eMMC it is listed as /dev/mmcblk0 and so I would have thought a uSD card when inserted would show up as /dev/mmcblk1?

Simon Bella

On the debian@debian-armhf image what is the root password to allow su root access?
thanks again

armhf

debian is the password too

armhf

Whichever device is booted is zero — I go into a bit of detail on this here:

That should be correct — wheezy uses debian / debian as you have noted. Pull the card and mount it in another system and read the log to see what is wrong. Note the ip address — could you be trying to connect to the wrong device?

Anthony Starks

I note that the debian image will boot from the microSD, but the ubuntu image fails (4 solid LEDs).
I order to use the ubuntu image, I wrote it to the eMMC from the already booted debian image

David Jarquín

on the debian-armhf image I see no modules loaded (trying to get module rt2800usb to work) thanks in advance .

Using a barrel 5V power supply (2.5A) worked for me being able to boot 13.04 on my BBB. I had tried two very high-output USB chargers (a 1.5A and 2A) with no luck. I went with this one: http://amzn.com/B002FA5WE2

armhf

I just got what you are doing wrong: don’t su root rather you should sudo su

Simon Bella

Thanks for the heads up!

Daniel Clarke

Firstly, thank you for taking the time to put these images together.

I’ve been trying to boot the debian image on my BBB for a little while now and I can’t ssh into it (or know if it’s booting). I have been executing ssh debian@debian-armhf.local but I get: ssh: Could not resolve hostname debian-armhf.local: nodename nor servname provided, or not known. I have tried booting from two different SD cards and I have also tried booting the ubuntu image.

5. diskutil eject disk1
6. insert the SD card into the SD slot, hold the SD boot button down and power on the board with an ethernet cable connected. I continue to hold the button down until the indicator lights start to flicker as I haven’t been able to find how long I’m supposed to hold the button down for.

I do not have a monitor with a HDMI input, so I do not know what the board is doing, however the indicator LEDs appear to perform their default functions as if the board had booted into angstrom (I can’t ssh root@beaglebone.local after following this procedure).

Could you please help me:

What are the LEDs supposed to be doing when the board boots the debian image?

Do I need to update the version of angstrom on the eMMC before I can boot the debian image from an SD card?

Do I need to configure eth0 in the .img file so that I can ssh into the board?

Do you have any suggestions as to what I am doing incorrectly?

armhf

Looks pretty good.

Step 6, I keep holding the button for about 2 seconds after power-on. The button makes a clicking sound. The lights will flicker quite a bit if it is booting. The board should take a DHCP address — I guess I’d look at your router (or whoever is providing DHCP) for the address. Alternatively you can edit /etc/network/interfaces for a static configuration before booting the SD.for Apps Group AWS training.

Most DHCP servers have an affinity for the MAC / IP address; the IP address should be the same the same one you are getting when you boot Angstrom. It’s also worth noting that the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file will take an affinity to the MAC address, so if you are moving this between boards, you will have trouble — remove the ATTR{address}=="aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff", part from the entry to break this affinity.

I have downloaded the ubuntu-13.04-armhf-minfs-3.8.12-bone17.img.xz (May 9, 2013) twice and have tried three different variations of writing it to SD and it works each time for me.

armhf

Nice find! You need to run sudo depmod to generate the /lib/modules/3.8.12-bone17/modules.dep file then reboot. I have updated the instructions above and will properly prepare the next bbb wheezy image I post.

I followed your instructions and nothing happened. Here is the strange part; Last night I flashed ubuntu to to eMMC and all the modules were loaded, but today I ran lsmod and all the modules were gone. So the problem is on both images (debian/ubuntu)… however the debian image never showed the modules loaded.

David Jarquín

Solved!
sudo depmod
sudo reboot
sudo modprobe rt2800usb

http://twitter.com/icutcher Pierre Escrieut

I have an issue whit the USB port. If I hotplug/unplug an USB device the USB port doesn’t work anymore. I need to reboot my BBB.

Any body an an idea to fix this issue?

Thanks.

armhf

I have the exact same issue… I have posted a message on eewiki.net to see if it is a known issue.

Pierre Escrieut

Thanks it’s work me too.

Josh Hays

I think it’s great you are sharing this information! I’m also interested in putting Ubuntu Server 12.04.2 on BBB. I have seen links elsewhere that says this site used to provide an Ubuntu 12.10 image, which would probably work as well. I’m new to Embedded Linux, but have been looking into Robot Operating System (ROS) for a while now. It seems ROS is not working well on Ubuntu 13.04 yet, so I would appreciate any advice on getting the older versions set up.

armhf

The Ubuntu 12.10 image is still available, but it does not work with booting off the internal MMC (I had not figured that out at the time I had built that image). I guess I could look at building one for 12.04 since it is LTS — I had not considered people running legacy stuff…

I posted a 12.04 image on the downloads page — I have only run a few basic tests so I am unsure if it needs to go back in the oven for more baking. Let me know if you try it and find problems.

armhf

I posted a 12.04.2 image on the downloads page. I have only run a few basic tests with it; let me know if you try it and find problems.

Simon Bella

Hi John,
Can you confirm that the /sys/class libraries for beaglebone black are working/valid with the Ubuntu Raring 13.04 image and the 3.8 kernel? Presently testing some c++ code but cannot seem to get any results?

Josh Hays

The install went smoothly. If I run into any issues I’ll let you know.

Thanks again!

armhf

I am using GPIOs and the analog inputs for a project I am working on without issue (specifically with 13.04 in fact). Can you be more specific as to which feature or pins you are trying to use?

Ed doodler

I have two BBBK’s. Both were reflashed with the 4.13 (April 13th ) reflasher one boots
Ubuntu fine, but not the other, I also reflashed one with the latest 5.20 and same thing. I tried so much
25+ hours of MLO u-boot.img files and such. The 53 minute reflash gets very old.

We bought these teh same day one from Mouser one from Element14 both rev A5A’s and yet seem to work different. I coped the dmmc blk0p1 to the pother board always the same. I did notice 4.13 and 5.20

What else am i order looking that would make these boards different???
Both boot teh 4.13 and 5.20 Angstrom Linux w/o issue. The 5.20 dies on u_boot
saying No Flattended Device Tree.

Im really stuck and frustrated… I like Ubuntu soooo much better that Angstrom! and node.js (yuk)

any help appreciated thanks

Ed

Simon Bella

Hi John, I cant figure out how to use the /sys/class libraries for programming the BBB hardware using C++? Is there any documentation or example code available that explains how to use this stuff with the 3.8 kernel? I followed a great youtube tutorial by Derek Molley (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaIpz00lE84) and some of the code there works OK but not all – as this is only suitable with the 3.2 Kernel – apparently due to the new device tree model?
I also cannot see any /sys/class files on the Ubuntu 13.04 image from this site that refers to using the analog inputs which I would also like to use. Any reference material or examples would be greatly appreciated!

i’m pretty close, but no cigar with a beaglebone black. first thing is i
guess that either the hardware or the ubuntu/debian images don’t have
support for SDHC cards? i happened to start with a 16GB card and the
beaglebone hangs on boot (as evidenced by the LEDs and no DHCP request.)

i
switched to a 2GB card and i can see the debian image booted from the
SD doing a DHCP request, and receiving an IP address. i can ping it but
if i try to ssh to the machine, after asking for a password it
unceremoniously dumps me out with “Connection Closed”. ssh -v does not
really shed any light onto what’s going on.

is it a mistake to
try to run headless with these images? where would the console output be
visible during boot? i’d prefer not to hook up a monitor and keyboard –
can i see the console output via usb or RS-232?

thanks for any ideas.

jimblough

replying to myself – what i’ve found is that unless the ethernet is disconnected *and* the board is not connected to a USB host, the ubuntu images will not boot. is this expected?

hm. actually it’s unstable – after booting and plugging in the ethernet, it gets an IP address, and then after a bit of ethernet activity, it crashes. maybe there is something wrong with my board.

armhf

Definitely unexpected behavior — these sound like instability problems when the board is powered via the USB port. Are you using a 2W (or better) power supply via the 5V barrel connector? Can you try any other power supply?

armhf

The Precise 12.04 image I posted does not have node.js built-in. I’ll leave out node.js as I update the images next time (it’s easy to install afterward for those who want it).

Sorry, I don’t have a lot of experience with the Angstrom image, but I did make a virgin snapshot of it from an unbooted board and posed it on the downloads page. Restoring that image to the internal eMMC only takes a few minutes.

jimblough

thanks for the reply… i’m not, just because i don’t have one. right now i’m using an HTC USB power supply which claims to be able to supply 1A at 5V, so 5W.

is powering thru USB known to be flaky? i understand there are current limits in the USB spec, but do they apply to wall-wart type USB power sources?

i do have a bench power supply so i can probably put something together to run the board via the 5V input.

the board has died twice in the middle of apt-get update. however, it was happy for several minutes running flood pings of various packet sizes, so perhaps this has more to do with CPU load than ethernet activity. that would be evidence for your idea.

James

Any idea if any of the Ubuntu images is compatible with the LCD4 cape?

armhf

It only takes a few minutes to write-out the .img to an SD card to test it. I’d be surprised if it isn’t, but I don’t have any specific knowledge for or against.

James

Downloaded ubuntu-12.04-armhf-minfs-3.8.13-bone18.img.xz (May 24, 2013), and it doesn’t seem to be supported, display is just blank.

James

Downloaded ubuntu-13.04-armhf-minfs-3.8.12-bone17.img.xz (May 9, 2013), and it doesnt seem to be supported on this one either. No display.

armhf

The images are setup to output to tty01 — by “working” do you expect they are configured to output to a display? The images will be configured by default to output to devices all BeagleBone Black’s have and you will need to do extra configuration to make specialized equipment work.

James

Sorry i’m a complete noob when it comes to Linux and these devices. I am just after a distribution of Linux etc that works with the standard LCD4 cape that is offered from CircuitCo. Just want it to display the GUI on the display etc. Angstroms latest distribution releases both 20.05.2013 and 27.05.2013 do this, but just looking to see if other distributions do too.

armhf

I better understand the question now. You will want to check the kernel log by typing dmesg to see if it is seeing the cape during boot. Or perhaps dmesg | grep cape to filter for messages that have “cape” in them.

armhf

To elaborate further, these images are setup as headless so they don’t even drive the HDMI out beyond basic text. As debian support for the bbbk improves, I’d expect apt-get install ubuntu-desktop to work, but it is very broken the last I checked.

Thanks for your work. I can save my time to setup my BBB as a debian machine.
However, could you let me know how to install your image into the internal 2GB MMC of BBB?
I don’t want to press user button every time I reboot..

The quick summary is:
Note: This .img can be directly applied to the internal eMMC while booted from an SD card.
xz -cd ubuntu-12.04-armhf-minfs-*.img.xz > /dev/mmcblk1
power down and remove SD

armhf

Well, the diver is loaded — that’s a good sign… I am surprised as I google this I am finding very little about it. It looks interesting — I ordered one from Mouser — I’ll let you know once I have my hands on it what I am able to work with it.

Neel Shah

Hi John, just wanted to add a data point here. The 13.04 image works well; the 12.04 image does not seem to start. I hold down USER/BOOT while booting from SD card, it just doesn’t seem to take (no status LED dance, no display on).

Thanks,
Neel

Stub

Hi guys, thought I’d chip in here with some potentially useful information. Got the BBB yesterday and like many wanted to boot Ubuntu off of the SSD. My BBB was exhibiting most of the problem behaviour mentioned in this thread.

I’ve eventually found a fail safe / works everytime method of booting up. (try it)

With the correctly flashed SSD:

1.) Unplug EVERYTHING (including network and Micro HDMI)
2.) Hold down S2 button(the tiny one closes to the micro sd port)
3.) Plug in the USB power cable
4.) Release the S2 button ONLY when you see the flurry of light flashes (4 LEDS)
5.) Wait 2 to 3 minutes before plugging anything in

Then slowly start adding peripherals. I have no doubt this is power related and will shortly be getting a 5v 2A barrel power connector. Hope it helps someone.

armhf

I double-checked the image and it works for me — I even zeroed out the first 100 MB of the SD card. Can you double-check that the MD5 is 24aa95fb78a6aa470668f06340760179?

Hi John – Thanks for the response. Yes the MD5 of my XZ file computes as 24aa95fb78a6aa470668f06340760179. Along those lines, the MD5 of the unzipped image is b3c41ba92f3df7adee02d2d2d6ad06af. What is yours?

Thanks, Neel

armhf

I see I don’t have anything in /etc/fstab for the 12.04 image. Let me fix that and repost the image.

armhf

I missed adding the following lines in the /etc/fstab if you want to fix-up your image manually:

Using the Ubuntu Raring 13.04(May9) above I appear to have an issue with the USB. I am transferring previous c++ code to open a modbus connection and generally seems to work – however examining the /var/log/syslog file I keep getting a “usb 1-1: bbbem timed out on ep0out len=0/0″ [bbbem is my application program]

Any idea what causes this log message refers to and why?
Simon

Marc Schultz

Hey John,
booting Ubuntu 13.04 from SDcard works perfectly. But should’nt it flash the eMMC? How can I do this? For the future, I want to use just the eMMC and not a SDcard.

Neel Shah

Hi John,

Thanks for the followup. I did try this image on two separate BBB’s and in both cases I do not get a response from the device. I hold down user boot and plug in power via the barrel jack (5V/2A). The power light turns on, but no LED lights and no HDMI display. I am suspecting a hardware issue at this point, since my 13.04 images also do not work anymore. Probably something dumb…

For reference, the MD5 of the XZ file matches yours, at e90b483bf7fc85a2e0f856c6c772dd32. The unzipped image MD5 is 1e45d9639ebd4f05c6c69fe5075e10e8.

Thanks again for your help and for providing these resources.

armhf

You have to flash it while booted from SD — see the directions on the downloads page.

JCJ

First of all thank you armhf for making a clean Debian image (and others) available!

>i switched to a 2GB card and i can see the debian image booted from the SD doing a DHCP request, and receiving an IP
>address. i can ping it but if i try to ssh to the machine, after asking for a password it unceremoniously dumps me out with
>”Connection Closed”. ssh -v does not really shed any light onto what’s going on.

I experienced exactly the same thing and hooked up the serial debug header to grab the log and there is defiantly something wierd going on, it complained about “mmcblk0: error” which is the built in Flash. After switching from USB powered to applying 5 V directly to VDD_5 (P9 Pin 3) everything worked as it shoould and I could ssh in.

It’s my bad — I forgot to build the module definitions for Debian before snapping the image. I was hoping to wait for the 3.10.x kernel series to update the image. See the second line in red under the image:

Please run sudo depmod after first boot to generate the kernel modules.dep and map files. (I’ll get this fixed for the next image.

Neel Shah

Turns out disk imaging in Windows was the problem. Booting into Linux and DDing the image revived everything. (XZ gave me weird permissions issues, even under sudo.) Your Ubuntu 12.04 image is now running ROS Groovy and GCC-4.8 on the BBB. Excellent work, and thanks for your support!

Jordi Guillaumes Pons

Hello. These images are great! I had debian running in my BBB in no time, without significant problems. Just an annoying glitch: the uBoot setup included in those images does not set the miniUSB input power limit to 1300mA (like the shipped Angstrom does). It leaves it at 500mA; that causes power starving when debian (or ubuntu) is booted from a uSD card and you try to use the ethernet port. I have asked in the circuitco support forums how to fix it and I have been told to rebuild uBoot adding the setup command to the boot scripts:

i2c wm 0x24 1 0x3e

That spell should put the current limit to 1300mA, so with a 1A usb charger there should be no power problems at all. You can check that is not the setting when you boot the debian image. Just type the following command (and answer “Y” to the confirmation request):

$ sudo i2cget -f 0 0x24 0x01

You will get the value 0x3d, which means the current limit for the “barrel” input connector is at 2500mA and the limit for the miniUSB is at 500mA, leading to the observed power problems.

Now, I have been unable to fix that. If I put the command at the beggining of uEnv.txt it does not seem to work, and if I try to build a patched version of uBoot with the command pre-configured, I end with an ubootable uSD. I have no experience nor previous knowledge of uBoot, so I am probaby doing it completely wrong. I am following these directions:

By the way, the patch downloaded as part of those instructions contains the power limit patch…
Does anybody have succesfully followed those instructions to build uBoot? Or should it be done in a different way?

armhf

Excellent! I was completely unaware of this. I will get u-boot updated over the weekend. This explains a lot of the power issues reported here using the USB connector as a power source.

Jordi Guillaumes Pons

Just FYI, the details about the BBB PMIC are here;http://www.ti.com/lit/gpn/tps65217b
The datasheet contains the I2C interface details. You are interested about the register 1 (PPATH) which controls the power paths (page 43). The two least-significant bits are used to set up the USB current limit:
00: 100mA
01: 500mA (default setting at reset)
10: 1300mA
11: 1800mA
The Angstrom image sets it to ’10’. If you query the chip using ‘i2cget -f 0 0x24 0x01 while running Angstrom you will get 0x3e. If you do it running debian/ubuntu you will get 0x3d (the default).
How will you rebuild uBoot? I have tried to do it and failed…

Jordi Guillaumes Pons

Replying to myself. I have finally been able to build U-Boot from sources and make it work. I was skipping one step in the procedure (the git checkout one). So right now I’m feeding my bbb with a 1A power supply, thru the mini-usb port and it is stable. :) Glad to retire again the bulky and hot 2.1A one I was using!

armhf

I was going to make it so it boots the SD if one is present otherwise boot from the eMMC. I also wanted to setup the i2c values in the uEnv.txt.

How much of your work might be valuable for my effort this weekend? Did you just pull the v2013.04 tag from git://git.denx.de/u-boot.git? Just thought I’d check in case anything was reusable.

In any event, thanks for the useful info above.

Jordi Guillaumes Pons

That was the step I was missing (checkout of v2013.04. What I did was to apply the patch, compile, copy the MLO and the u-boot.img to the boot partition and KEEP the uEnv.txt distributed in your image. So It kept the automatic uSD booting. The U-Boot patch adds the i2c setting to the default boot script, so it is not necessary to add it to uEnv.txt.

Antonio Villanueva Segura

Hello. Someone has taken control of the BeagleBoneBlack UARTS?

I tried to manipulate AM335x-bone-common.dtsi like

ocp: ocp {

uart1: serial@44e09000 {
status = “okay”;
};

uart2: serial@48022000 {
status = “okay”;
};

and in am33xx_pinmux: pinmux@44e10800

uart2_pins: pinmux_uart2_pins {
pinctrl-single,pins = ;
};

When I make ” dmesg | grep tty ” I see tty ports , but don’t work .
The BBB is A5A version and OS(Debian 7.0 wheezy)

Many thanks for the this works, i’m a newby in the word of the BBB and i have a little problem with serial port.
I followed the installation procedure for ubuntu 12.04 lts. everything seems to work correctly, but I see only one serial port in / dev (/ dev/ttyO0).
What should I do to use the other 4 ports ? i need it for my project :(

stickyc

Is there a ‘multiverse’ repository for this distro? I was looking to install unrar, but it doesn’t seem to exist in the main repos and my attempts to add multiverse are failing (I’m assuming it’s because there’s no ‘armhf’ architecture?).

Ah, thanks! That worked (though I was using precise, changing the pointers from raring worked fine).

armhf

I have to look into this one — a quick Google shows people are recompiling the kernel which seems unnecessary.

BeagBoy

I everybody and many thanks for this job :)
I’m a newby and I’m working on a project based on beaglebone Black card.
I need to use serial port (dev/ttyO1, /dev/ttyO2, etc …) but it’s not seems to be present on pre-instalaled image.
I have downloaded and installed succefully ubuntu 12.04 lts image, but i don’t understand why i don’t see serial port device file ?

BeagBoy

Thanks for the answer.
I’ll follow the link and see where it leads me !

armhf

I updated the BeagleBone Black images to supply 1.3A via USB — the change is in uEnv.txt. Thanks again for the tip.

Huge thanks for the 12.04 image John. This really helped out. Now the next question is what is the kernel upgrade process? For example you just posted the bone20 image to replace the bone18 one, so how would one go about upgrading a bone18 to a bone20 without overwriting?

I see that Robert has posted an install-me.sh script with each kernel release, that I am working through. I have installed mkimage but have got stuck at an uboot issue. Is this even the correct approach that I should keep pursuing?

You can essentially ignore the “linux-firmware-image_1.0raring_all.deb” package, as all the good “cape” stuff is in 3.8.13-bone20-firmware.tar.gz, extract to /lib/firmware/ (along with everything that is also in the *.deb)…

Alaska Scold

Thank heaps for these images. 1 quick question about the Debian Wheezy (3.8.13-bone20) image though. The CPU seems to be locked at around 660MHz, I’ve looked online and am stumped – how do I enable CPU throttling? Other images I have used throttle from around 200MHz up to the full 1000MHz.

Any hints would be greatly welcomed.

Alaska Scold

After running a few diffs between this image and the 1 on my eMMC I figured it out, and it’s extremely easy.

I am looking into the device tree overlays (.dtbo) this weekend — its all still new to me and still looks cryptic. My goal is to create overlays for uart and CAN. Can you test the overlay to tell me if I got it right? I use Modbus and don’t use the CAN bus.

armhf

I am no device tree guru, but I did an apt-get install device-tree-compiler and built overlays for ttyO1, ttyO2, ttyO4, and ttyO5.

Copy them to /lib/firmware and apply them after each boot with the command: echo ttyO1_armhf.com > /sys/devices/bone_capemgr*/slots

ttyO3 does not have an RX pinout (it’s tied to the TDA19988 HDMI chip), and ttyO5 can’t be applied unless the HDMI overlay is not loaded. Note that ttyO0 is available on J1, so there are four easy UARTs available.

yep, it was definitely the power supply. a 5V power brick that used to power an ancient moca modem is working great.

Joe D

hey, I’ve got the LTS version working, and I’ve plugged a screen in via the HDMI, but the terminal it displays is offset (to the left) so the first line is off the edge, it’s also quite bury.. Any suggestions on how I can tackle this?

armhf

It sounds like an overscan issue. Does your display have an option to show the native resolution?

zestyping

Hi, thank you so much for putting together these images! They made it easy to boot and install Ubuntu. I used the 13.04 image.

I am seeing unusually long boot times, though. My BeagleBone Black boots in 17 seconds as shipped with Angstrom on the eMMC, but with this Ubuntu 13.04 image, it takes 2 minutes 28 seconds to boot. I am measuring the time from power-on to the time that /etc/rc.local is invoked.

Has anyone experienced this? Any ideas on how to investigate the cause?

So it’s 5 seconds to get from mounting / to “plymouth-log terminated”, and then there is nothing for two long minutes until rc.local starts. (I set up my rc.local to bring up networking over usb0, which involves a “modprobe g_multi”. I know that it’s not the modprobe that is taking two minutes, because the first line of my rc.local lights up the LEDs, and I don’t see this happening until 2:28 after power on.)

Any ideas or clues would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

armhf

What USB ethernet adapter are you using?

Simon Bella

Hi

How do I mount and edit files (/etc/ssh/ssh_config) on the internal eMMC flash after booting from SD card using ubuntu 12.04 image above? The reason I ask is that I made an error in configuring the /etc/ssd/ssh_config file on the eMMC image and now cannot login via ssh when booting from the internal eMMC flash. So I have booted up from SD card but need to edit the file on the eMMC so I can get back to where I was?

After booting from SD card I can see /dev/mmcblk0, mmblk0p1, mmblk0p2, mmcblk1, mmblk1p1, mmblk1p2, mmcblk1boot0 and mmcblk1boot1 ?

I assume that after booting from SD card I need to edit files on mmblk1p2 – but not sure how to do this?
Thanks
Simon

But I’m pretty sure that Ethernet over USB has nothing to do with it. I was seeing boot times in the 2:30 range (both booting from the SD card and from eMMC after writing Ubuntu to it) before I tried anything related to Ethernet over USB. I confirmed this by using “echo default-on > …/trigger” to turn on an LED at the top of /etc/init.d/rc, and the LED doesn’t turn on until about 2:25 after power on. So the delay is occurring long before any of the rc scripts are started.

my board becomes half bricked. The flashing process appeared to be proceeded properly (All four user LED light solid after the operation), but some error message appear from the serial SSH.

Afterwards, the board can’t be booted up properly both from eMMC nor SD card. The user LED blink properly at the first time after powering up, (the user LEDs light up one by one until all become solid, then all off within 5 seconds) but no more led blink nor heart beat blink is observed since then.)

I hooked to the terminal with serial port and observed the error message in the booting progress:

failed to scale voltage down -22ms

and

failed to read who-am-i register

Although I can still log into the terminal and run some command (cd, ls or cat), the internet access does not work.

I tired to boot with these images out of SD with almost the same result. (for ubuntu precise, it keeps prompting out “failed to scale down voltage -22ms” after logged in for around 1 minute.

Have you tried a new power supply? Try using a 1500 to 2000 mA 5V power supply on the barrel connector input (examples are listed on the accessories page). You might also try a new microSD card. Also, if you have anything plugged-in to the headers or either USB, take them out. Failing these tests, you could be dealing with a hardware issue with the board itself; CircuitCo does have an RMA process.

The nice thing about these images is that its the same high quality Ubuntu and Wheezy that runs on x86 (except that it is for armhf devices). Just do an apt-get install build-essential to get the GNU C compiler (and the few extras that come with it).

So I think this is pretty strong evidence that the two-minute delay happens before /etc/rc.local runs and that g_multi is not related to the delay.

armhf

I’ll try to reproduce, but I’d expect if you used the Ethernet connection and the stock image, your boot time would be 15 to 17 seconds. Then when you use the Ethernet over USB, the two minute timeout gets added in. I should get a chance this evening to take a closer look.

Thomas Laskowski

12.04 doesn’t seem to boot for me. No lights turn on and it’s just stuck. The default works fine. I am using the same 8GB SD card that worked in a Beagleboard-Xm. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

-Tom

armhf

I just downloaded and verified that the Ubuntu 12.04.02 3.8.13-bone-20 image works. As far as suggestions — mount the second partition of the microSD and examine ./var/log/dmesg and ./var/log/syslog

Thomas Laskowski

Hi,

The board won’t boot with the SD card installed. I get 3 blue lights and it’s just stuck there…

Hey,
turns out I was flashing the wrong drive. My spare SSD. For some reason the uSD card comes up as /dev/sdc, not sde like I was expecting. I already have 4 drives and was expecting the USB reader to come up next, not switch them around like that. However, I’m not getting an Ethernet IP. I have DHCP turned on on my router. Thank you for your help.

-Tom

Thomas Laskowski

Using 13.04 image now, seems to work better. I am compiling what I wanted to from the internal flash now.

Thanks.

David25

Hi,
I’m new to Beaglebone Black and Linux,

but this site and pre-built image helped me a lot. Thanks for your great work !

That being said, I have one question.

I installed this image on 32GB SD card.
However, I found that I can only use small part of SD card.
(1M for boot and 1.8G for rootfs).

Is it possible to use the rest of SD card ?
How can I expand the size of root file system ?

Thanks !
David

David25

Hi,
I’m new to Beaglebone Black and Linux,

but this site and pre-built image helped me a lot. Thanks for your great work !
That being said, I have one question.

I installed this image on 32GB SD card.
However, I found that I can only use small part of SD card.
(1M for boot and 1.8G for rootfs).

Is it possible to use the rest of SD card ?
How can I expand the size of root file system ?

I am trying to figure out an issue that I’m having with the Ubuntu 13.04 image. Everything is fine when I boot up with Ethernet connected, but when I boot without it, it takes around 3 minutes to boot. That’s not a problem. The problem is after booting without network and plugging in a cable, it doesn’t seem to get an IP address. I tried ifdown/ifup but no luck. Any ideas?

Thanks

amit

how can be able to install linux headers in order to compile modules on bbb platform with ubuntu .
If i run command sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r),it says E: Couldn’t find any package by regex ‘linux-headers-3.8.13-bone20′ even after updating.

armhf

I am using Robert Nelson’s kernels right now, so these versions correspond to his. The headers can be found here.

armhf

I am also having trouble with the Ethernet hotplug and the USB hotplug. I am waiting for the 3.10 kernel to go stable to redo the images — I am hoping that will be a stable option.

Thomas Laskowski

Okay, good to know that I’m not the only one. I’ve seen other reports of a similar issue, even with different distros.

-Tom

doodah

unfortunately to be able to use the capemgr to load from the uEnv.txt file at boot we need a newer kernel. RCN’s latest kernel cannot be updated using his script as the boot parition on your image is too small. Any chance you can remedy this in the future ? I really like using your images but now i have to jump through hoops to get my system so I can load the DTO when the system boots. Thanks for you work on this. It really simplified a lot until i needed the newer kernel.

2) We need to add a pinmux entry for the serial port at the end of the pinmux@44e10800 section (I added mine right after pinmux_rstctl_pins). In this case we will use ttyO1 and we need a unique handle address — I chose 0x81 because it was much higher than any already in use:

pinmux_serial1_pins {

pinctrl-single,pins = ;

linux,phandle = ;

phandle = ;

};

3) Find the serial@48022000 entry and change:

status = "disabled";

to

pinctrl-names = "default";

pinctrl-0 = ;

status = "okay";

Notice we use the same pinmux handle we chose in #2 here.

4) Then compile the dts to a dtb and copy the new dtb file to the /boot/dtbs directory:

# dtc -I dts -O dtb -o am335x-boneblack.dtb am335x-boneblack.dts

# cp am335x-boneblack.dtb /boot/dtbs

armhf

The other option is to upgrade the kernel, but Robert’s script wont work with the armhf.com image setup here. Fortunately, it’s pretty straight-forward to update the kernel manually:

Finally, make a zImage symbolic link to the new kernel in the /boot directory & reboot.

You don’t need mkimage or to build a temp rootfs — just the three archive files & the new symbolic link.

doodah

I’ve now installed the 12.04 and the 13.04 images to my BB eMMC. I then booted from the flash and followed these instructions for both images. I end up both times with a system that will not boot after applying these 3 changes and setting the symbolic link. I really prefer the 12.04 version of Ubuntu as I have found it more stable right now, but thought since the image name above referenced the raring version that I would try it. Any other suggestions on how I can get my kernel updated ? I really want to use the capemgr features instead of modifying the dtb directly. I have done the above now 4 times and carefully verified each file and step in the process you outlined. Thank you for your time.

Thomas Laskowski

Hi John,

I’m having an issue after resizing my SD card. It says Read-only file system. Any ideas how to fix that? Thanks,

-Tom

armhf

Try putting it in another linux system and run a fsck — this is probably a corruption issue somehow.

Michael Marzec

when trying to boot the precise img from the sd card I’m getting this error via the serial terminal. any ideas?

Thanks for the suggestion. It kind of worked, but there were way too many errors. Some corruption. I will start with a fresh image then resize it right away. I copied the internal flash to the memory card on a live system, that’s probably why it happened. Thanks for your help.

-Tom

armhf

There are some errors due to the probing process which will try and boot either the internal eMMC or the uSD. You can tweak the uEnv.txt to only boot externally to reduce or eliminate the errors. They can be ignored, though.

Michael Marzec

The BBB halts after the last line (**No partition table – mmc 0**). I can use the serial terminal to prob around after this but, the bbb fails to load precise. I will see if tweaking the uEnv.txt to only externally helps any.

Thomas Laskowski

You should use a stand alone PSU. The laptop can’t provide enough power through USB to run the board stably.

scxl99

Hey, thanks a lot for your work!

I’m running the Debian Wheezy image on a BBB and I’m trying to get Midi working but my Midi software throws me errors:

ALSA lib seq_hw.c:457:(snd_seq_hw_open) open /dev/snd/seq failed: No such file or directory
MIDI (ALSA): could not open ALSA sequencer: No such file or directory

As suggested somewhere else I tried

sudo modprobe snd-seq

but only got an error:

FATAL: Module snd-seq not found.

So, it seems the module is missing. I don’t know how to proceed further. I’ve never compiled a kernel or similar.

I don’t expect detailed instructions. Just a few general hints maybe…

Cheers,
Axel

armhf

I find getting all of the Alsa sound elements correct is a real chore. Open alsamixer and turn every level up as a quick proof you can get sound. Make sure you are using the correct software to play audio. I did this a couple years back on the BeagleBoard XM and it took quite a bit of fiddling to get the settings right. I would look at the settings used to make an XM work for ideas of things to try — for example: http://e2e.ti.com/support/dsp/omap_applications_processors/f/447/t/155220.aspx

daniel

Hi, I’m new to Beaglebone Black and thanks for your great work !

But, now, I have a problem to use it.
$sudo xz -cd ubuntu-raring-13.04-armhf-3.8.13-bone20.img.xz > sdb
$./build_kernel.sh

The kernel in these images are from Robert Nelson. The best thing to do would be to get the kernel config and build a 3.8 kernel from git. Here is a great resource for building kernels if you need it. I just use an external hard disk and build it right on the beaglebone. http://kernelnewbies.org/KernelBuild

Hi John, thanks again for all the fantastic resources here. Your source images have been very helpful in drawing out the full potential of the BBB.

I do have a question about how you used XZ to compress these images so tightly – I am currently trying to transplant a modified Ubuntu image from one BBB to another, the size is abou 1.8 GB, and I can’t compress it beyond 700 MB. How did you get your images so dang small?

armhf

Since the empty part of the disk gets compressed too, it is important to reduce the entropy there. I untar the files onto a filesystem that has its blank space zeroed-out before compressing them. Also, purge anything you can in the image like logs and the package cache.

armhf

The drivers in the image are straight from the Linux git repo. It looks like maybe you have to install it to /ib/firmware yourself? http://wiki.debian.org/rtl819x

Were you able to get your sound working? If you could share your results I think others would find it useful.

Neel Shah

Hi John,

I’m attempting to use kernel version 3.8.13-bone18 for a high throughput USB camera application. Do you know where can I find the build flags and/or modules baked into this version of the kernel? And how to modify it if necessary?

armhf

In many Linux kernels, the config used to build the kernel can be found as a gzipped file here: /proc/config.gz

Neel Shah

Ah! Thanks for the pointer.

http://www.canol.info/ Canol Gökel

I just bought BeagleBone Black and found out that it doesn’t support full HD which is very bad since we need to display full HD pictures. Is there any way to show full HD pictures via this device? It says it has 3D graphics accelerator, can I use OpenGL or a game library like SDL to show full HD pictures? Also, somebody mentioned that it cannot show 24 bit color is that true? I don’t need to show a video or something, just pictures.

scome

Hi,
Thank you for putting these images available to everyone.

I’ve installed debian-wheezy-7.0.0-armhf-3.8.13-bone20 on my BBB and I try to upgrade it with v3.8.13-bone24 using install-me.sh script.
The installation failed every time and I’ve isolated the problem to the lack of the SOC.sh file in /boot/uboot.
Does anyone know the way to proceed?

Regards,
Sylvain

João M. S. Silva

Hi,

Thanks for the images. They are really helpful.

I’m using the Ubuntu Raring 13.04 image and I’m observing some issues with USB.

This is what I could find:

– when trying to connect a GSM modem USB pen, sometimes the device is recognized but the device tree for /dev/ttyUSBx is not created (it works with Fedora and Mint in other computers)

– sometimes, after recognizing some devices (like USB hub or USB pen drive) it no longer recognized other devices (after plug in no change in dmesg) until reboot

I think it’s not a power problem, since I’m using a 4 A (20 W) power source and USB limit is:

I also tried with three different USB camera modules. All three work OK on my laptop.

But on the BBB, one of them works OK, while the others have show a corrupted video stream (I’m using luvcview).

Does anyone know if these USB issues are software- or hardware-related?

Thanks.

armhf

Several people have reported that executing cat /dev/bus/usb/001/001 > /dev/null causes USB devices to be recognized without rebooting.

João M. S. Silva

That works somehow. Does it ” wake-up” the USB bus?

Do you know where the problem comes from? If from board, kernel or distro?

Thanks.

Michael

Hello!

I have installed Ubuntu 13.04 on BeagleBoneBlack successfully. I am trying to configured ssh and remote folders to be able to run Python interpreter remotely from PyCharm. It works like a charm until i am trying to use Adofruit_BBIO library.

If i run the script locally with sudo it works OK. How can I resolve this? Any ideas about?

Simon Bella

Hi John,

Your site is absolute tops for information on BBB stuff!

Do you know if the Unbuntu 12.04 LTS (june 9) image supports the battery operation on the BBB ?
I am looking at an application that need to ensure that time & date are valid after power up so the RTC data needs battery backup incase of power failure and network is not available? That is, if I connect a battery to the pads (REV B3 pcb Board) does the unbuntu image drivers look after this function?

Also, do you have any ideas on how to setup one of the serial ports (USART) to allow use of the RTS signal for controlling a half duplex RS485 chip? Been looking at the chip data and it seems that the processor does support half duplex communications by using the RTS signal connected to the TXEN of an appropriate RS485 driver chip? – Not sure how to configure the drivers to do this?
thank for any advise
Simon

Gary A Mort

I had a similiar problem with using install-me.sh on ubuntu. Everything seems to execute fine but when I reboot it is still booting the old kernel.

It turned out that the kernel being booted is /boot/zImage, which is a synlink to the kernel vmlinuz-3.8.13-bone20. Deleting the symlink and recreating it to point to the new kernel, vmlinuz-3.8.13-bone26

I’m running ubuntu-precise-12.04.2-armhf-3.8.13-bone20.img.xz from the Internal flash. I know it is running from the internal flash, as it works fine with and without a blank SD card in there.

– When I try to boot with a blank 16GB MBR formatted SD card in there, it hangs at boot (box pings, but can’t ssh in)
– If I format the card as GPT, it boots, but then I can’t use it, since it is inconsistent in naming of devices, it shows as running and booting off mmcblk0p2 in mount, but then fdisk shows mmcblk0 is the SD card, and mmcblk1 is the internal storage:

What on earth is going on? How can I use the SD card slot for additional storage?

The /boot/uEnv.txt file probes the external uSD and if it finds one present, it attempts to boot it. In your case, you want to edit this file to only boot from the internal eMMC. Have a bootable external uSD handy has you edit and try to get it right as mistakes can make things unbootable. To recover, you need to boot from an external uSD and mount the internal eMMC.

Alex Dawson

Logged into the system, I don’t have a /boot/uEnv.txt file – given I did it by extracting the image to the eMMC, should I have one? Is there a default one I can use?

As an example I have burned the Debian Wheezy image to my SD card and booted from it.
I have logged in as the user: debian and used the password: debian
I have the following prompt:
debian@debian-armhf:~$
I type:
xz -cd debian-wheezy-7.0.0-armhf-3.8.13-bone20.img.xz > /dev/sdX
I get:
-bash: /dev/sdX: Permission denied
If instead I type:
xz -cd debian-wheezy-7.0.0-armhf-3.8.13-bone20.img.xz > /dev/mmcblk1
I get:
-bash: /dev/mmcblk1: Permission denied

I am getting the same permission denied with either of the Ubuntu images too.
I suspect I should be logged in as root but I don’t have a working password for root.

RTC on ubuntu-precise-12.04 image?
Does anyone know how to setup the RTC drivers on the BBB with the ubuntu-precise-12.04 or pont me to any documentation available on how to set them up using the device tree class libraries .. eg. /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/device

Simon Bella

Finally gave up on trying to get the onboard BBB RTC to work?

So I installed a DS1307 i2c chip with a 32kHz xtal and battery and connected it to the BBB with the SCL pin connected to P9/19 and the SDA pin to P9/20 corresponding to rtc-1 in /sys/class/i2c-adapter/i2c-1. (the DS1307 needs 5v – make sure only to use the BBB pull-ups to 3.3v line)

To detect the i2c device you will need to install the i2c-tools package # sudo apt-get install i2c-tools
then issue command #sudo i2cdetect -r 1 (for some reason i2c-0 isn’t available on BBB?)
You should see the DS1307 i2c slave address at 0x68

Then register the device using # echo ds1307 0x68 > /sys/class/i2c-adapter/i2c-1/new_device
which will allow you to read the clock using the command # hwclock -r -f /dev/rtc1

You can then set the clock to system time using # hwclock -w -f /dev/rtc1
Or you can set the system time with the rtc chip using # hwclock -s -f /dev/rtc1 (needed at boot time)

To make sure the BBB reads the rtc chip at bootup you need to put all these into a script – I used the /etc/rc.local

Simon Bella

If the BBB is not connected to internet the bootup sequence takes quite a long time – probably waiting for network connections – is there anyway to speed up this process?

Also one problem with putting the i2c startup commands in /etc/rc.local however is that it seems to run right at the end of th eboot up sequence – since the /var/log/syslog file still shows Jan1 2000 for bootup logs and the /etc/rc.local scripts runs right at the end?

May need to write up a popper init sequence for bootup before syslog commences?

Marco Gasparini

Hi everyone,

I just tried doing a networking restart

# /etc/init.d/networking restart

on a beagle bone black, and the network stops working until I reboot the system;
I just tried it on a freshly downloaded / flashed Debian Wheezy 7.0.0; I also tried with older versions, same problem;

My suggestion would be to try another network or DHCP server — I am not able to reproduce what you are seeing, so it could well be environmental.

armhf

You could change the permissions on the slots device.

armhf

With Debian try su alone rather than sudo su

Michael

I couldn’t configure ubuntu, but debian is now wokrs perfectly.

Marco Gasparini

I tried another network with another dhcp server but without success.

I tried to restart the network interface with a previous wheezy version and with the new one as weel, but the result is the same. I also tried to change the BeagleBone but the result is the same, again…

I didn’t tell you that I’m running the os from external sd and not from the internal one. I also tried to change the sd, changing brand, but I had no success…

So, I really don’t understand what I’m doing wrong…

Maybe I could try to do the same thing but this time from internal sd…

What do you think?

Illutian Kade

This is probably a “doh! question” but.

After becoming root and using “xz -cd ubuntu-raring-13.04-armhf-3.8.13-bone20.img.xz > /dev/mmcblk1″

I get ‘No such file or directory’. Now, I’m smart enough to know this means the file is missing. Question is….where’s the step that says to dump the XZ file onto the SDcard?

Hi Alex, I am glad that u got this to work. I haven’t. I use Ubuntu 13.04 (GNU/Linux 3.8.13-bone20 armv7l) that I have dd from SD to internal flash. It works perfectly from the internal 1.9 gB mmc. When I try to use the external SD card, it does not work so well. If I boot from the SD card, I can see the SD card and the internal flash as mmc0 and mmc1. However if I boot from internal mmc with nothing in the SD socket, it does not detect the insertion of an SD card later. If I boot from the internal mmc with a DOS 32 gB SD card in the socket, it gets totally confused:

It shows that my 32 gB SD card is mounted as mmcblk0p1 on /boot/uboot and the internal mmc flas is mounted as mmcblk0p2 on /. If I do an ls of /boot/uboot, I see that the SD card is effectively there. The normal uboot files are not there. I think that the uEnv.txt in the DOS partition of the Ubuntu image has a bug. However I am totally knowledgeable about uboot. What did u change in your fstab?

Yves

Alex Dawson

Hi Yves,

uboot automatically assumes what you’re booting off is mmcblk0 – so the fix is to change /etc/fstab – I can’t remember if I needed /boot/uEnv.txt or not – can’t easily test, sorry.

This confirms that mmcblk0p1 is the microSD while mmcblk0p2 is the internal emmc 2gB memory. This is not right. I tried to modify the fstab to mount mmcblk1p2 to / and mmcblk1p1 to /boot/uboot and that seems to sort of fix the problem but it is a kludge: the boot device should be mmcblk0. uEnv.txt is wrong and should be fixed. Anyone?

kasbah

Hey, can you provide the kernel source you used for the Debian 7.0.0 image? I want to compile additional modules…

Pankaj Kumar

Hi,
I want to perform software development work in PHP/MySQL environment on beaglebone black board. Which one of the ubuntu images provided by you contains all necessary components for this environment? Can you please also confirm whether this board can be used as a normal desktop computer for day to day software development work in LAMP environment?

Best Regards …
Pankaj Kumar

armhf

The “best” image is the Ubuntu Saucy image because it is the most recent Ubuntu release and Ubuntu is incredibly well supported by the community (the ARM and Intel releases are nearly identical in most ways). I don’t use a desktop, but I believe it is a great choice for headless. For LAMP work have you ever considered just using an Amazon AWS VM? The micro.t1 tier is free for the first year.

Note: These images have the aptitude cache purged before the image is built, so be sure to perform an apt-get update before trying to install new packages.

The instructions presented here assume full root sudo su permissions and not sudo permissions alone.
Why does it matter? A command like sudo xz -cd ./ubuntu-13.04-armhf-minfs-*.img.xz > /dev/sdb is actually two commands. First, xz is executed to perform a decompression operation and emit the byte stream to stdout. Second, the shell takes the byte stream and writes it to the specified device. Using the sudo command will only elevate the first xz command to root, which we do not actually need and leave the /dev/sdb stdout redirection to be performed by your unelevated shell (the part we do need root permissions to do). The operation will fail with a permission denied error. Elevating the shell to root via sudo su allows this command to succeed.

An alternative is to use the tee command and elevate it with sudo like so: xz -cd ./ubuntu-13.04-armhf-minfs-*.img.xz | sudo tee /dev/sdb > /dev/null

fifoufrench

ok so if i well understood, i need to elevate the second command to root with “| sudo” and use ” tee” to write on emmc ?

But, Can I create a root user ? So i could do “xz -cd debian-wheezy-7.2-armhf-3.8.13-bone28.img.xz > /dev/mmcblk1″ without problems ! as in Débian or fedora ?

and thanks for your help !

Davide Faconti

Hi John,

thank for making this website.

I am currently working with BBB and I would like to contribute. I noticed that you haven’t updated recently the website,

I would like to maintain it, if you agree.

In particular, I would like to “submit” two images: one with kernel 3.12 + ubuntu 12.04 and another one with the same kernel patched with preemp_RT.

If you are interested you can write me an email at [ davide . faconti @ gmail . com ]

I have been using the previous 12.04.2+bone20 images for a while with the following storage config:
-image installed to eMMC
-64GB microSD (/dev/mmcblk0) with ~58.5GB ext4 (/dev/mmcblk0p1) and 1GB linux-swap (/dev/mmcblk0p2)
-/var moved to /dev/mmcblk0p1 and a matching entry in /etc/fstab

The BBB boots fine with the microSD inserted, /var gets mounted correctly and the swap space gets used automatically.

I have just tried the new 12.04.3+bone30 image installed to the eMMC and that’s it (i.e., I haven’t made any changes to the storage config):
The BBB boots fine when there is nothing in the microSD slot.
But with a microSD card inserted (tried 16GB and 64GB) the BBB seems to get stuck while booting.
I have tried with and without partitions on the microSD card.
When it boots, the LEDs flash as expected briefly then stop with only the D4 (2) LED on. With a HDMI cable plugged in, the penguin is displayed in the top left corner, but it gets no further.
There seems to be nothing new in syslog after removing the microSD card and power-cycling so it seems to be confusing U-Boot and never booting Linux.

What are your thoughts?

armhf

I updated the bootloader partition to use the october build of u-boot which also changed the uEnv.txt. By default, the with the bootloader is located on /dev/mmcblk0p1 — did you move var here and copy MLO, u-boot, and uEnv.txt to the root of it? Your swap is located where u-boot is going to look for the kernel. This all being said, I am unsure how the old bootloader would have worked in this case either.

Here is a /boot/uboot/uEnv.txt with more parameters that will allow you to control the configuration more closely. Note that I specify mmcdev=0 here which means it should always look to boot from the external uSD first, then the next behavior is to try the internal eMMC.

Can you try replacing the contents of /boot/uboot/uEnv.txt with the lines below and change the booting partition (2 in the case below) on the second and third lines:

I was messing about with the uEnv.txt file on the internal storage uboot partition and seem to have bricked my BBB. I have a microSD card that boots fine in other units when the boot switch is pressed down but not on the one I was messing with. Is there a way I can get back to booting off the microSD?

If you image this to an external uSD, holding the USER button at power-on should always force the external uSD to boot. This will get you back to a known location each iteration as you experiment.

armhf

I have been testing this more today. I edited the post above to remove the first line that specified mmcdev=0; having this present makes it impossible to boot mmc 1 (the internal eMMC) because uEnv.txt gets reparsed after the attempt to set mmc to 1 thus reverting it to zero.

I also see why you probably are experiencing different boot behavior too. The new scan only looks for a uSD being present in the external slot, but not that a kernel actually can be loaded like the old one did. This creates a situation where the external uSD is attempted to be booted even if the kernel is on the internal eMMC.

It is probably best for you to use the previous u-boot.img and uEnv.txt until I write a new uEnv.txt to deal with this.

Gianni

I tried loading it manually, it works fine!!!
thanks

Gianni

armhf

I suppose you could put that in /etc/rc.local if you want it to load at boot.

I can’t seem to resolve this. Here is what I have done:
1: messed with the uEnv.txt on the internal MMC to the point it won’t boot
2: flashed ubuntu-precise-12.04.3-armhf-3.8.13-bone30.img onto a microSD card
3: pop the card in, hold down the User/Boot button then plug in power
4: the power LED by the barrel plug lights up, the four user LED do not light up, even after waiting 30 seconds with the User/Boot button pressed

It seems like it is hitting the internal U-Boot despite the User/Boot button being pressed.

Not sure where to go from here…

armhf

>>I have a microSD card that boots fine in other units when the boot switch is pressed down

If you can show that a uSD is bootable with the USER button depressed one one board and not the other (all else equal, same barrel power supply, etc), then I think you probably do have a real hardware problem with the board.

I did update the image to 11/17 that allows it to boot from eMMC with an external uSD present (having no kernel on the uSD obviously).

JHS

Hi,

Thanks for making these images available.

I ran into a strange problem that’s a little different from what Linden Mills-Connery is seeing. After installed the debian-wheezy-7.2-armhf-3.8.13-bone30 image to the internal eMMC, it would only boot if I leave a bootable microSD card in (and it boots from the microSD). If I remove the bootable microSD card, then all I see is the penguin logo and it does not seem to go any further. Another strange thing is that with the bootable microSD card inserted, if I force the microSD boot, it would stuck at the penguin as well.

So it would only boot if:

– leave a bootable microSD in the
– NOT force microSD boot

I ended up going back to the bone20 image and that boots fine from the eMMC.

Perhaps I’m doing something wrong with the latest (bone30) image?

Thanks.

JHS

armhf

In my haste to resolve the boot-to-eMMC-and-use-uSD-as-storage issue for Linden, I neglected to cover that case. I have since resolved this issue and the 11/20 images are now fully functional.

As I look at Linden’s use case, I do want to support it better — to use the BBB as Linden does, you have to modify /etc/fstab to load the proper partition since it will be /dev/mmcblk1 rather than /dev/mmcblk0 when an external uSD is present. I intend to change fstab to mount by label so it wont matter at all if an external uSD is present or not.

Linden Mills-Connery

John,

I mangled the uEnv.txt on two BBBs now with the same symptoms. So I think I can rule out an actual HW problem.

I just want to clarify a few U-Boot things:
-I know there is a U-Boot FAT partition on the internal memory, this is the one I was messing with
-when the img.xz is flashed to the microSD it creates a U-Boot FAT partition
-so when the uSD BOOT button is pressed, does the internal U-Boot partition get ‘hit’ at all or is the switch a hard switch to the uSD U-Boot partition?

I’m on vacation this week and didn’t bring the broken BBBs with me. I will try the suggestions next week.

Thanks for your help.

armhf

By default the eMMC is booted but holding the “uSD BOOT” button at power-on should cause it to try and boot the external uSD instead. It wont do it unless you are powering it on (not a reset). This should always allow you to boot even if the internal eMMC is corrupt. The 11/20 images have the original p1 boot partition, so it should behave exactly as it did before.

armhf

There are three possible boots: 1) external uSD, 2) internal eMMC, and 3) internal eMMC with an unbootable uSD present. In case #1 the boot device seen by Linux will be mmcblk0p1, in case #2 the boot device seen by Linux will be mmcblk0p1, but in case #3 the boot device seen by Linux will be mmcblk1p1.

This is different than the MMC device. In case #2 the Linux device is mmcblk0p1 but the physical MMC device to u-boot is MMC 1.

The built-in boot loader hooks MMC1’s boot loader unless the uSD Boot button is pressed, the it hooks MMC0’s boot loader. The new Angrstom u-boot must be checking MMC0 to see if it can load /boot/zImage from p1 (based on what you describe). When I tested it last April it did not do this. Either way, if the internal eMMC boot loader is toast, you have to press the uSD Boot loader to recover using a uSD-only boot.

MaxBeagleton

I have a USB device that uses a FDTI chip (0403:6001) but when I plug it into my BBB with the Debian debian-wheezy-7.2-armhf-3.8.13-bone30 image, /dev/ttyUSB0 is not created, so my application won’t open the device. Can I add the ftdi_sio module to the kernel? If so, how?

armhf

Are you sure it is not just a hot-plug issue? Try plugging it in then rebooting as a check.

MaxBeagleton

I got it. I had to do:
depmod
modprobe ftdi_sio

armhf

Thanks, I updated the 11/23 images to include the module dependancies by default.

armhf

Can you run depmod -a -v “3.8.13-bone30″ as root to see if it changes this behavior?

armhf

I just updated the What’s New section above with the details.

armhf

Thanks for sharing — I will experiment with the setting.

Lutz Bickhardt

Thanks for the reply. Will be back from a vyage in one week and the do the test!
Cordialement

Hello!
I’ve tried to access the ADC from the BeagleBoneBlack with both, Ubuntu 13.10 and 12.04 with no success.
Has anyone been able to do so?
thanks!

Actium

You need load the overlay to use the ADC either at runtime via
# echo BB-ADC > /sys/devices/bone_capemgr.*/slots
or by adding the following to the Kernel command line (see optargs in /boot/uboot/uEnv.txt):
capemgr.enable_partno=BB-ADC

You should then be able to read the ADC values in single-shot mode
# cat /sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:device0/in_voltage*_raw

Unfortunately the tiadc driver as of 3.8.13-bone30 still suffers from two issues:
1. reading several channels consecutively results in regular errors, see https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/beagleboard/99kDAfTs_ds/JJBx0r9ShCAJ
2. the values read from sysfs lag behind the current values by at least one read()-call (i’ve observed even two or three), so if you want up-to-date values you’ll have to read() several times

You need to zero out the device before laying down the filesystem to reduce entropy. Also, purge the package caches and anything you don’t need.

armhf

I have not used that feature — do you mean Ethernet over USB then SSH?

Dovalle

Hi,

after installing the image to SD card and boot from it, i tried to install the ubuntu Desktop, after about 45 minutes, it said there is not enough space. it was 16 GB card. what should i do ? what is the size of ARM Ubuntu? thanks

This is freaking awesome, I hope you guys keep working on this, especially with the Arduino Tre coming. I’ve been using the ubuntu 12.04.2 bbone20 image and it is solid. Turning it into a full-blown ARM xubuntu desktop was as simple as “apt-get update && apt-get install xubuntu-desktop software-center”. I am shocked at how many Ubuntu packages are available and simply just work. One thing I noticed, if someone is trying to make an ARM PC out of this — on the newer 12.04.3 bbone 30 image, it doesn’t autoboot off of the MMC (without the boot button pressed), but if I replace the uEnv.txt with the one from the other image, it does. Here’s the older uEnv.txt if anyone is interested:

Any idea about enabling SPI, I2C on android on BBB board.? Thanks in advance…

armhf

And you installed an 11/29 image? I would appreciate you checking the boot script below (which should be the 11/29 one) as I need to address this if it is an issue. I had a couple of iterations addressing the new script to better support those who wanted to use an external uSD for storage — This script should behave the same as the one you post above.

I believe you need to apt-get update then apt-get install i2c-tools. If you google the i2c-tools you will find lots of info.

mattby

Yep, using the 11/29 image (md5sum 36060e4209389d7d65422a549ede5111). And yes, the snippet that you gave is the same on the 11/29 image I used except the image has a newline between ‘mmcpart=2′ and ‘optargs=fixrtc’ :).

I re-imaged a microSD just in case, same thing, can turn it on and off.

NEW UENV.TXT
Here’s what I see:
* if I hold the BOOT-switch, it boots from microSD
* but if I just power up, it hangs, lighting up USER LEDs 0,1,2 (not 3) solid, no heartbeat, no activity
(FYI, I have a Beagle Board Black A5C)

OLD UENV.TXT
The other uEnv.txt I attached was from this very webpage, ubuntu-precise-12.04.2-armhf-3.8.13-bone20.img.xz (md5sum 19e81997cce7217a68c04088d8f31edd). If I use the new image but replace only uEnv.txt with the old one, it boots from microSD _without_ holding the BOOT-switch, which is desirable for electrical projects :).

Btw, I tried the 13.10 image above (md5sum 8173dffeaae12421a5542c3578afdd82) and I had stability problems using X, and some weird 1 character screen scrolling left/right thing even in text console.

Jason

anyone got the USB SSH working with the latest ubuntu 13.10 image??

:S_:S

I have installed and uploaded the saucy image on 16GB SD-card for BBB and the system boots properly.
Since it was barebone image I tried to install LXDE and lubuntu so I executed sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop lxde
After full installation the graphical login session shows up and as soon as I move mouse on the screen the mouse pointer runs out from screen and the session freezes (even trying to login without using mouse will fallback into login session again).
I have changed the mouse but the problem will not get fixed.
I am not sure if there is something wrong with installation! Is there any pre built image for BBB with graphical interface and more packages? Thanks

Valentin Riegler

thanks!

just read it a bit late, but it solved my problem!!

now there´s just the problem with the display anymore: with the display from 4d-systems (without touchscreen) stacked onto the beaglebone I can´t attach the ADC. But i already contacted 4D-systems, maybe they can help me :-)

oliver.b

Thanks for these images. I’ve been running them on a few BBB for streaming applications at a community radio station and they’ve been quite solid!

One issue I’ve been unable to sort out is that all of our boards get stuck occasionally during power-up. This is particularly unfortunate for headless/unattended systems. It tends to happen one every ten to twenty power-ups.

It seems many people have this problem regardless of distro – that noise on the BBB’s serial port can cause uboot to get stuck.

I had similar problems on the saucy image from 11/29/2013 (13.10, md5 8173dffeaae12421a5542c3578afdd82) and xubuntu desktop. However, the precise image from 11/29 (12.04.3, md5 36060e4209389d7d65422a549ede5111) was really solid (under xubuntu, haven’t tried lubuntu yet). I don’t think there is pre built GUI Ubuntu image for BBB, but I have made several flavors, if anyone has a server :).

scxl99

A big thank you for the images from me too.

I’ve booted from the sd card until now (btw, I have to hold down the boot button to get the Debian image on the sd card to boot which wasn’t the case with an older image), but now I want to write the system I’ve setup on the card to the internal eMMC and use the sd card for storage.

I boot from the sd, do

sudo su
cd /

xz -cd debian-wheezy-7.2-armhf-3.8.13-bone30.img.xz > /dev/mmcblk1

and I get

xz: debian-wheezy-7.2-armhf-3.8.13-bone30.img.xz: No such file or directory

I wrote the image to the sd card on a Mac using PiFiller. Maybe this

i’m rather new to these things and now I’m confused. How do I get the system on my card onto the Bone’s internal memory?

Axel

scxl99

The kernel on the new Debian images finally has full midi support :-)

scxl99

Ok, I’ve figured out that I have to copy the img from my Mac to the BBB. I put it on a usb drive, mounted that on the BBB and did:

gunzip /media/usbdrive/2013-Dec-15_BBB_backup.img.gz > /dev/mmcblk1

I got:

gzip: /media/usbdrive/2013-Dec-15_BBB_backup.img: No space left on device

I hope this refers to the space on the sd card (I can expand the partition) and doesn’t mean the img is too big for the internal flash. I’ll report back.

What became of the old way of copying an sd img by just plugging the power in while holding the boot button pressed?

tech freak

i have flashed ubuntu 12.04.3 lts after extracting the image using archive manager.i have used image writer to write the image on to the sd card.I could see the two partitions after writing the image.but when i boot the bbb pressing the boot button i don’t see the boot sequence only usr0 and usr2 continue to glow and obviously i cant ssh.. can u tell me where i have gone wrong?

scxl99

The Pi Filler img actually expanded to 8 gig (the size of my sd card) so that’s why I got the ‘no space left’.
Expanding the partition on my sd card (precisely following the instructions on this site) resulted in an unbootable sd card… pain…

Valdir Gomes

I’m trying to setup a cross compilation environment with Virtual Box, Ubuntu 12.04, which toolchain I supposed to use?

Bogdan_teo

after installing Ubuntu 13.10 the systemctl command is not working
Can not start/stop services
Under Angstrom works fine

It is most likely archive manager. Is there any way you can just use xz to do it?

armhf

I don’t bother with cross compiling because it is slow and more difficult. Would you be surprised to learn that putting a USB hard drive on a BeagleBone is as fast or faster than an Intel desktop? If you do an apt-get update then an apt-get install build-essential on the BeagleBone it will pull down the ARM gcc and you can compile natively in ARM. This is how Robert Nelson builds his ARM kernels (but uses an ARM wandboard). If you still want to cross-compile, I would recommend looking at Robert’s wiki: http://eewiki.net/display/linuxonarm/BeagleBone+Black

if i use so the image writer doesn’t recognize it as .img file.. it was a .tar.xz file initially and it can be flashed using an image writer so didn’t wrk!!

Mahammad Hegazy

I have the same problem, the device hangs anytime I move the mouse.. tried several mice and all the same. Problem with ubuntu desktop Kernel is 3.8.13-bone32, ubuntu is 13.10 saucy. Moreover, when I enter the demo user password it takes me to a black screen, and leds keep flashing life forever. Never show the desktop. Did you have any solution for this?

:S_:S

Hi Armhf,
I tried two versions of ubuntu image build (13.10 and 14.04 (availiable on one of the provided links on this page)),
Once I installed the minimal ubuntu build on 16GB SD-Card I have installed different desktop environments as follows
apt-get install xubuntu-desktop xfce4
then I realised the desktop environment shows and loads but the mouse cursor does not work and gets disappears and the
linux freezes (I have to reboot BBB). I tried with different USB mice and all of them failed.
Do you know what is the problem and how can I fix it.
Thanks

armhf

Yes, the GUI desktops available in the apt-get repositories are known to be not working for the BeagleBone Black. FWIW, I focus on headless embedded development, so I wont have more specific GUI advice. I read some months back about efforts and some successes by others on Robert Nelson’s Wiki: http://eewiki.net/display/linuxonarm/BeagleBone+Black

mat JaDoel

kernel need to be updated, latest 3.8.13 series are 3.8.13-bone33.. your image 3.8.13-bone30

mrtnalvrz

May this be related to the issue/solution I reported a month ago? (read below)

echo on > /sys/devices/ocp.3/47400000.usb/power/control

mattby

Try the 12.04.3 image, I had no problems with the GUI binaries on that image.

Stephen Gloor

Hi – is there an easy way to patch my kernel to the latest? I installed the previous version of your excellent Precise 12.04 image and have installed a complicated application that I am loath to re-install on this latest image. I need the latest patches as I am having problems with USB hotplug and if this version fixes I would prefer this rather than the workaround.

Stephen Gloor

Another thing – I downloaded the new 12.04 image and imaged it to a known good SD card 3 times three different ways and it would not boot. In the same BBB the old image I used before worked fine. Are you sure the 12.04 image is OK?

armhf

It is possible. The latest image updates the uEnv.txt script and a few people have reported problems. I am going to revert the file on the next image I will be positing here in the next few weeks. Here is the previous image if you want to try it:

There is a discussion somewhere below on this topic if you want to look for it.

It goes like this (and make a backup before you do this). Replace _dest with your target — maybe that’s root /
After you extract these, link the /boot/zImage to your new kernel. This can be done on a booted system or mounted from another system.

Thanks – I fixed the USB problem with the workaround in the comments. Will download the new one when it is available and give it a go.

aiw_admin

Because I’m fairly new to Linux I really appreciate your information regarding the BBB and Ubuntu load. Once I’ve got my BBB working the way I want is there a good location for tutorial on how to create a new image from the existing setup and transfer to a blank uSD card? Any info or link for proper way to do that would be greatly appreciated!!

armhf

To backup the SD card: cat /dev/mmcblk1 > ./myimage.bin
To copy the file back to SD: cat ./myimage.bin > /dev/mmcblk1

aiw_admin

So the command:
cat ./myimage.bin > /dev/mmcblk1

will create a brand new image based on the contents of the eMMC and transfer it to the SD card?

Thanks so much for the quick response!!

armhf

It backs-up the uSD card to file, then you can copy the file back to a new uSD card. Be aware that it will make a single large file like 8GB or whatever size your uSD card is.

aiw_admin

I see what your saying and I think maybe I didn’t explain my request well enough. What I’m saying is that once I have all the packages and settings loaded onto my BBB I would like to learn how to create a brand new image from the existing BBB and transfer that to a SD card so that I could load the identical setup to a new BBB without having to repeat all the same loads and setup. Kind of a build a “gold standard” and then clone to other units.

Sorry for any confusion in my initial question…..

Anonymous Coward

I installed the 13.10 image (which worked great, thanks!) but had trouble when trying to compile drivers for my wifi adapter. The Ubuntu Saucy repos seem to have kernel headers for 3.5.* and 3.11.*, but no 3.8.* thats in the the image you provided.

Do you know where I can get the kernel headers for the disk image?

guyannanfei25

Press uboot before power on

sleslie

Pls help me! The debian-wheezy-7.2-armhf-3.8.13-bone30.img.xz kicks me out after logging in with the user debian… :(

Trev

Mr Clark – Your site has been absolutely invaluable for my Beaglebone Black projects. Thank you so much for providing abundant information in a clear and concise way.

aiw_admin

Looks like this may do the trick for Angstrom. Would there be a way to modify for Ubuntu usage?

Thanks for the clarification — I get what you want to do now. OpenWrt is a great example of how far this can be taken by combining a squashfs readonly root with a jffs2 overlay filesystem. The simplest way to proceed using these images, in my opinion, would be to mount the root filesystem as read-only in fstab and apply an overlay filesystem from a different partition. There is a nice discussion of overlay filesystems in ubuntu here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/109413/how-do-i-use-overlayfs

Can you provide additional detail? Are you connecting to the serial console or Ethernet?

Fabien Mousnier

Hi everybody,
I need to obtain an *.xz.img of ubuntu 12.04 LTS with CONFIG_LEGACY_PTYS=y and CONFIG_LEGACY_PTY_COUNT=256 options in the kernel .config file.

Please does anyone can indicated me how is it possible to build a new 12.04 kernel for BBK and make a xz.img file ?
I tried cross compilation and/or embedded compilation on BBK itself with no success.
Thx.

This is for saucy, but the exact same techniques will build a precise 12.04 kernel for you. The original .config can be had by looking at /proc/config.gz on a booted system.

Fabien Mousnier

Thanks a lot,
Can I try to do this with a cross compiler or is it possible on BBK itself.
I’m not a hard coder, isn’t possible to add these options to your 12.04 LTS image for an easyest operation :)

armhf

The images I offer here are not the result of compiling code. I just wrote some scripts to pull the root file system from ubuntu and a kernel from Robert Nelson. When I started offering the images last May there were no other options than to tediously stitch together the OS by hand. I started this site for people who wanted to develop with the board rather than build a unix OS. The best place to get kernel help would be Robert’s wiki.

Fabien Mousnier

understanding thanks a lot.

Fabien Mousnier

I searched information on the robert nelson site, on kernel updates and I saw the existence of a script called install-me.sh that performs auto-update kernel.
reading the config. I saw that it contained options I needed. (PTYS)

However impossible to execute this script there is always a problem of space in / boot I understand how to extend the system has my scdard but I don’t understand how is it possibe to extand /root directory ?

armhf

Skip down a few entries to the conversation with Stephen Gloor — the manual application is pretty easy.

Fabien Mousnier

BBK wont boot after :/

Fabien Mousnier

Because an answer come always with a new problem … :)

My BBK boot now :) but when I wanted activate UART I don’t find folder named :

bone_capemgr* in /sys/devices folder.

any idea ?

Fabien Mousnier

I’m just done with succes compilation of 3.13 kernel for BBK with the help of RCNelson wiki, but it’s the same probleme after create the SDcard and boot with it.

No bone_capemgr* in /sys/devices folder. and no UART file in /lib/firmware

Please I need help …

armhf

It’s the 3rd one down bone_capemgr.9. The dtb files are on the downloads page.

The images are setup to be accessed via Ethernet, USB WiFi, or 3v3 TTL serial from J1. There have been a few questions on how to setup the kernel for Ethernet tunneling over USB, but nobody has it working to my knowledge.

Luca

Hi all,
thanks for all your works!
I need the SGX driver and it seems it must be built using “TI SGX Graphics SDK”.
I’m actually having some problem in building the driver (I don’t understand very well how to do that).

Why isn’t the driver already provided with ARMHF images…?

Luca

All guides I found say to build a new kernel first. Then build the SGX driver (pvrsrvkm.ko).
Why can’t I use the kernel I already have in my BBB? and where can I find it?

Thanks

David

Hey everyone,

I’m booting a beaglebone black with the Ubuntu 12.04 image found above (November 29, 2013). I’m experiencing 2+ minute boot times . User “zestyping” described the same problem 8 months ago. Without ethernet attached, ubuntu seems to hang up for about 2 minutes.

So I think this is pretty strong evidence that the two-minute delay happens before /etc/rc.local runs and that g_multi is not related to the delay.”

Is there any way to remedy this delay? My application does not allow for ethernet, but I do need to boot up much faster than 2 minutes. Thanks a lot!

-David

armhf

Have you looked at the output of dmesg to see what is hanging? I expect you could comment out the eth0 device from /etc/network/interfaces or set a static IP address as potential work-arounds. Let us know how it goes.

David

Commenting the eth0 lines from /etc/network/interfaces, or setting eth0 to a static address solved the boot delay problem. Now I’m up to the login line in about 15 seconds–awesome.

Thanks for your help!

David

Hello again,

On the Ubuntu 12.04 image found above (November 29, 2013), what support is there for power saving features? How can I put the machine into a suspend or a hibernate mode? Get it out of said state? I really appreciate any feedback.

-David

mat JaDoel

My adaptor 5V – 2.5A, how to make it use all the Ampere available? Do I need recompile u-boot?

armhf

Only the current drawn from the USB adapter is software selectable. The uEnv.txt file is already configured to allow 1200mw from the USB adapter. The barrel adapter should allow the full current potential.

Jun

Hi Chris,
If you want network over usb, mass storage and serial port over usb works in ubuntu image as in angstrom distribution, you need to start g_multi on boot. A simple way is
1. add a line g_multi to /etc/modules.
2. create file usbgadge.conf (file name doesn’t matter) under /etc/modprobe.d/ and have this line in the file:
options g_multi file=/dev/mmcblk0p1 stall=0

That is it, reboot your BBB and on your host computer you can see mass storage popup. If you want access network, run ifconfig make sure usb0 interface is there, you will see usb0 does not have an ip assigned, you need setup an ip for it manually:
sudo ifconfig usb0 192.168.7.1 netmask 255.255.255.0

Then try to ping 192.168.7.2

The serial port ttyACM0, default to 115200 8N1.

Note: I tried above steps on debian, but I think ubuntu should be the same.

九江 袁

when I try to make modules, it turns out error like this: /lib/modules/3.8.13-bone30/build: No such file or directory, What shall I do? Will you can answer me! Thanks

I have solved the problem already. Thanks for your work. Besides I also have the USB HUB recongize problem.
Echo on > /sys/bus/usb/device/1-1/power/control can solve the hotplug on hub,but when hub unplug then plug .
Beaglebone can’t recongize the hub

Yuro

is it possible to have recovery partition on sdcard
on BBB,when the real os can’t boot
i want it to boot from sdcard but i couldn’t find any source how to do that
setting both os is easy but how can i recognize system isn’t booting
it should be done at boot loader i think simple program to change bootorder
i have another idea to have an external hardware watchdog driven by gpio
when heartbeat signal isnt detected for a long time and it could set low the BBB user button
but I’m interested in software solution

is there any way to detect system failure and change boot order to boot from sdcard instead of internal eMMC

thank you

http://www.atepeee.blogspot.com Agung Triwicaksono Pamungkas

I have finish installing 12.04 but when i insert on beaglebone black and
boot It can’t processing and the indicator leds not blinking so It
can’t read. How shoud i do? Thanks before

German

Ubuntu password change?
Not sure why but it appears the ubuntu image is not able to permanently change its password using the #passwd command ?
Even though it accepts the new password – doesn’t seem to have any effect – must be doing something wrong?

German

It does work – I was not entering the username correctly. Now would like to change the username from ubuntu to something else – is this possible?

armhf

# create a user
sudo adduser
# add the user to the sudo group
sudo adduser sudo
# use the credentials of the new account to get rid of the ubuntu account
sudo rmuser ubuntu
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AddUsersHowto

Mike72

Very fine release indeed.
I’ve seem to have run in to a problem… Everytime I boot up the bbb the /dev/mmcblk0p1 mounts to /boot/uboot folder !
I can’t find it anywhere, have set upp all possible variables in the uenv.txt and also by hand in u-boot itself. Still the darn thing mounts the same folder, seems like it hardcoded ? I try to boot up the emmc with a blank or no sd-card installed, and it always stalls before bootup, and seems to try to mount the vfat to the folder, I get it going by inserting the card with the folder and after that change the mount to as it should be: mount /dev/mmcblk1p1 /boot/uboot and all is fine until next reboot…

Thanks in advance.
– Mike -

German

I just received my new BBB REV C Release with new 4GB eMMC .. how do I load a copy of the latest

Ubuntu Precise 12.04.3 LTS image (Nov 29th 2013) into the 4GB eMMC to take advantage of the extra space?

Yesterday,I udated board and downloaded BBB-eMMC-flasher-2013.06.06.img.xz and flashed the eMMC successfully. I removed the power, remove the uSD and then connected to the computer via USB and the BBB wouldn’t mount as a USB drive.Please tell me what happen ?

Thanks

Bradley

And i couldn’t use FTDI to visit the BBB!

Marcos Torres

Seems that the issue is cause if any usb mouse is connected while the gui starts. If no mouse is connected, then the gui starts fine and you can use the system only with the keyboard.

German

Hi,
While trying your new installation instructions I keep getting a forbidden error when using wget to download the files?
e.g.

You have to be root, do a sudo su to become root (or prefix each command with sudo).

German

yes .. have carried out all operations under root (sudo su) and the downloaded file bone-uboot.tar.xz is listed as with root ownership using ls -al command? Not sure what is happening here?

armhf

Sorry, I see, this is totally normal. Since you are writing to FAT16 which does not support owners, tar fails — this is completely normal and expected — just ignore it.

German

After ignoring the error on the boot image the rootfs system loaded Ok, but the SD card did not boot up .. appears that the boot did not load .. I will try again tomorrow .. thanks for all the help.

armhf

Some things to check:
1) MLO, u-boot.img, and uEnv.txt are present in /dev/sdX1
2) /dev/sdX2 looks like a linux root filesystem
3) that the /dev/sdX1 partition is marked bootable in fdisk

German

Not sure what is happening .. went through the procedure again as previously?
I tried this using a 4GB microSD card … it is what I have used on previous images OK
1) MLO, u-boot.img and Env.txt are present on /dev/sdb1 (in my case)
2) /dev.sdb2 definitely looks like a linux file system ..a 3.9GB file system
3) /dev/sdb1 is marked as bootable W95/FAT16 as noted

When I try to boot the card on the BBB .. the BBB continuously echo’s CCCCCCCCCC … etc on the ttyo?
?

calzon65

Hello,

I’m really excited to find your website and this version of Debian for the BBB. I’ve been using ArchLinux ARM (Alarm) for about two years on a PogoPlug and the 2GB emmc version of the BBB. I have always liked the simplicity of Alarm and I think the ARchLinux ARM guys have done a nice job making the installation of Alarm on a whole bunch of ARM systems simple and straight forward with their instructions. When I saw your instructions, I felt like I was home.

Anyway, I wanted to try Debian on my new BBB (I just purchased the 4GB emmc version) but the Debian version from BeagleBone.org seems to come preloaded with a bunch of stuff. For example I noticed apache was configured with some BeagleBone.org web pages. I was looking for a “clean” version of Debian and hope I found it here.

I already created my SD card and the BBB is booting fine. In your instructions you said the login is debian and password is debian and that works fine, but what is the root password?

armhf

In debian, just issue sudo su to become root and it is the password of whoever is issuing sudo (debian in this case).

I really like arch as well — it is a very fine linux and what I consider to be the only peer of Gentoo. The install instructions are indeed inspired by archlinuxarm — the kernel config as well. These images have the fewest packages installed to be useful, virgin, never been booted, and are very close to bare metal debian and ubuntu. People can apt-get install whatever is needed more than that. BTW — The package cache is purged to reduce the image size, so it needs an apt-get update to repopulate it. There are a couple of new updates since 6/3, so apt-get upgrade as well.

calzon65

armhf,

Thank you for the quick reply and that worked to allow me to access the root password. I have never been a user of sudo, I understand the “dangers” of logging in and running as root, but it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks (e.g., I come from the AT&T Unix System V days of the early 80s). Anyway, I’m thrilled to find your website. I absolutely love the cleanness of its design.

I have one humble suggestion … in your Debian instructions you used Ubuntu as the example for configuring the rootfs(e.g., the part about wget, etc.) I think it would be really easy to just use the actual Debian file name in your instructions. Especially if someone was not paying attention and downloaded Ubuntu, thinking they were following the instructions for Debian … it could cause some confusion. Yes, you did say in parenthesis that it was the Unbutu example, but sometimes folks don’t always read and/or comprehend everything.

Well I’m off and am looking forward to messing around with my BBB this weekend using your clean install of Debian. I will stay in touch on these boards.

calzon65

On the BBB when you are booted from a microSD card, the eMMC /dev are as follows:

boot – /dev/mmcblk1p1
root – /dev/mmcblk1p2

calzon65

Yesterday I posted a comment with a copy of a script I developed to make it easier to flash my BBB eMMC with Debian ARMhf. It appears that post was removed. I am new to this website, so I was not sure if we should be sharing code like that. Should I not do that in the future?

On another front, my BBB seems to be running well with Debian ARMhf. I am loving how fast I can flash my BBB with your version of Debian. It allows me to experiment and if I want, very easily install a fresh version of Debian ARMhf.

armhf

The board is setup to automatically take posts from people who are signed into Disqus. Some posts pop-up to be approved by the moderator. Your post was just waiting to be approved. If it makes sense, feel free to make a pull request for a new repository: https://github.com/armhf

calzon65

Thank you armfh, I just wanted to make sure I follow the correct protocol for your website.

armhf

I got a chance to double-check the install and had no issues, here are my exact commands (I changed ‘sda’ to ‘sdX’ so nobody would use them verbatim and ruin their HDD or something:

Thank you armhf, being new to Debian, I am still learning what is part of the Debian repository and what is not.

calzon65

armhf sorry I have another question because I’m still new to Debian. Since I have been relying on apt-get to install packages in the correct location and make any “registration” changes, I am not 100% sure where to extract the tar. I looked at the linux-headers file you linked (tar -tf) and I see the file structure is ./usr/lib/modules/xxx. I ask because I thought these kinds of headers might be installed in /usr/src, sorry I’m at a loss and don’t want to screw this up.

Should I extract these files to the same location (e.g., /usr/lib/modules/xxx)? And are there any “registration” house keeping functions I need to do that maybe apt-get would have done for me?

armhf

Just unpack the tar to the root and everything will go into usr/lib/modules/3.14.4.1-bone-armhf.com/build and that should be all that is needed.

calzon65

OK armhf, I will hold of extracting the tar. Earlier I did try to apt-get some linux-headers from the Debian package database and one of those that I pulled down seemed to have installed in /usr/src. In any case, I will wait for you to post back the results of your research before I extract anything.

armhf

The headers archive has been updated it you want to give it a try.

German

thanks for all the help but i still cannot get it to boot?

All the steps work except when I try to write to boot file, you said to ignore the uid errors but i think this is where it fails?
when I use the command :

I am interested in looking at this further, can you email me directly at indydev@icloud.com?

German

Ah .. finally got it?
I think the problem was when using previously used sd card and previous directories on desktop? I needed to delete all previous /boot and /rootfs directories from desktop and make sure all were unmounted. Repeating the procedure then was successful .. after I did this I did not get the uid error when performing the tar copy?
Sorry for the pain!

German

Also, is there any particular reason why the boot size is made 16M when the actual file size is around 0.5M ?
Wouldn’t is be better to make this smaller to allow more space in the rootfs given the limited eMMC capacity?

armhf

16 is a round number, no specific reason other than that. You may need to pick FAT12 if you take it down real small. The old images were small lake this, perhaps that is a good edit to make to the instructions for the size reason you point out.

I have noticed that the latest image for Ubuntu 14.04 – trusty seems to have endless folder definitions for /sys/devices/44e10800.pinmux/driver/44e10800.pinmux/driver/44e10800.pinmux/driver/ ……. etc? Found these while searching for the file that allocates pins?

I cannot seem to locate the folder/file that shows how the BBB pins have been allocated … /pinctrl/44e10800.pinmux/pinmux-pins ?
I think we need these to work out how to disable hdmi pins for use as general I/O pins, there doesn’t seem to be a specific hdmi entry in the am335x-boneblack.dtb file?

Yes found it ok!
I will never trust nautilus while viewing files over the network again? When using nautilus on my desktop to view the BBB files (via SSH) this directory shows up as “Empty” for some reason? but other directories show up fine?
I assume nautilus was reliable on these matters?

I have entered each as a single command line, but end up with a message saying “mount: only root can do that” and it does not mount the uboot neither the ubuntu-14.04.

Finally, Im uncertain how to type each line this way or a full copy & paste of the command. Or use permissions using “sudo”.
Any suggestions or feed-back on a simple guide would be greatly appreciated…
Cheers,
Luis M.Ferrel

armhf

Become root before executing the commands: sudo su

Anton

Greetings

I am new to BeagleBone Black. I have a GPS connected to ttyACM0, I can see GPS data on this port using Minicom. I have setup ttyO1 and am able to set it using stty to 38400 baud, 8 data, 1 stop, no parity and no flow control. The NMEA data read from ttyACM0 is converted into RTCM3 and directed to ttyO1. The conversion is done properly but i am not seeing the data via Minicom on ttyO1. If I hook ttyO1 (P9_24 and P_26 this is after cd /lib/firmware and echo ttyO1_armhf.com > sys/devices/bone_capemgr*/slots) up to a RS232 port on my PC and using Putty or Realterm to see what I get I only get garbage. Why is this and what can i do to correct this? Your assistance will be greatly appreciated

九江 袁

Hi, armhf. I come to an bug .When I use ‘ifconfig’ to change my mac address .It reply ‘RTNETLINK answers: Operation not supported’. It seems you forget a choice when building kernel

German

Hi, is there a way to permanently delete/empty the /var/log/syslog file? If I delete its contents or delete the file whenever I re-boot the old contents – dated Jan 1, 2000 still get written after bootup?

armhf

Placing echo > /var/log/syslog in /etc/rc.local would purge the log. I am surprised the clock is that far off as the “fixrtc” kernel argument is present:

Does setting the hwaddress option in /etc/network/interfaces work for you?

armhf

The goal is to make the images easy to deploy so this may make sense. Have you considered making the sd card on the BBB itself while booted from the default Angstrom?

KissCool

Hi, I have an AM335X starter kit from TI. And I want to know if it’s possible to mount UBUNTU 12.04 LTS on this board ?

I download your image but the screen on my starter don’t work.

what I should do for working ?

sorry for my bad English and sorry for this question but I am newbie on LINUX.

thank you for your help!!

KissCool

Hi, I have an AM335X starter kit from TI. And I want to know if it’s possible to mount UBUNTU 12.04 LTS on this board ?

I download your image but the screen on my starter don’t work.

what I should do for working ?

sorry for my bad English and sorry for this question but I am newbie on LINUX.

thank you for your help!!

九江 袁

no , I’m using Linux ubuntu-armhf 3.8.13-bone30

armhf

That seems very possible, but you will need to compile am335x-evmsk.dts and add the resulting “am335x-evmsk.dtb” file to /boot/dtbs. The /boot/uboot/uEnv.txt file will also require tweaking.

KissCool

Thank you for your reply.

what I should do ?

download a Ubuntu precise 12.04.4 LTS precompiled for beaglebone black and change the “am335x-evmsk.dtb” with the new one ?
but I don’t understand what I should tweaking on the uEnv.txt

armhf

If you already have the am335x-evmsk.dtb file (and I do see this is in that image), then you should be close. Do you have a serial console? It will be hard to know how far along the boot process you are getting without this output.

KissCool

Yes I have one

KissCool

I download this version and I put it on my SDcard. but the LCD don’t work

Hey just wondering what happened to the plain old img files I used to be able to a sd card.

KissCool

I do the update and install the fbset but when I try tu use fbset I have this message :
open /dev/fb0: No such file or directory.
I read the article but I don’t understand what I should do ?

armhf

Did you make sure the FAT partition is marked bootable?

armhf

The root filesystem extraction was to avoid having to expand the partition later as was the case with the img files. Based on the trouble various people are having, it may make sense to build both the next time new images are deployed.

armhf

I have a TI eval kit coming in later this week and will look at it first hand.

http://carsonevans.ca/ Carson Evans

I understand. There will probably always be people who prefer the rootfs and those who prefer the IMG.

proftech

Can you tell me how / where the “Linux-headers” file is used? I see in the instructions where to use the uboot file but nothing about the Linux-headers file. I believe I need it to compile Asterisk?? Thanks

armhf

unpack them to the root: tar xJvf linux-headers-3.14.4.1-bone-armhf.com.tar.xz -C /
Then just compile normally and they should be found.

armhf

Check the installation steps you followed as you appear to be booting a kernel from another distribution. In particular, the fdisk command in step 2a should have removed the old partition table.

Initialize a new partition table by selecting o, then verify the partition table is empty by selecting p.

This looks like a situation where a previous partition 1 is hanging around with a kernel in it — here is what partition 1 is supposed to look like in the armhf.com distribution:

Thanks for your work! I’ve been looking all over the web for a simple way to do this. I wanted to build my system from the ground up on an SD card and boot from it, so as to not disturb the factory load on the EMMC until I have everything built and tested. I’ll give it a try next week.

Seth Dziengeleski

Hi, I’ve been using the armhf image files for a little over a year and recently tried to update to your newest release (June 3). I don’t have a screen attached so I depend on the uart console (comes out to J1 on the BBB). Whenever I use the u-boot image provided above my system fails to boot. After a long (many seconds) wait I see ‘C’ being printed repeatedly every few seconds. I was able to use just the new rootfs image fine without touching u-boot.

Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer.

JHS

Hi,

Any idea what I need to change in uEnv.txt to boot off an external USB HDD (assuming that I’ve already copied the SD root partition to the USB HDD)?

Thanks.

JHS

armhf

Was the SD card reformatted and the files extracted directly to the boot mount point (-C option)? The X-loader (MLO) should be the first file copied to the FAT partition and the tar file is setup to extract this first.

However, it looks like the BeagleBone Black itself is limited to having the early bootstrap files X-loader (MLO), u-boot.img, and uEnv.txt on an external microSD or the internal eMMC formatted as FAT. Everything else can be on USB, but these three files can not.

If you were to create a FAT microSD and copy MLO, u-boot.img, and uEnv.txt to it (in that order, BTW), then you only need to tweak uEnv.txt to look for the kernel and root filesystem elsewhere.

The code above is adapting the boot between the external microSD and the internal eMMC. In general they are both located at /dev/mmcblk0p2 unless an unbootable microSD is present and then it is located at /dev/mmcblk1p2.

That is a lot of extra info, but the part you care about is setting these params properly:mmcrootfstype=ext4 rootwait fixrtc
bootpart=0:2
mmcroot=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rw

If your USB decvice is ext4, then mmcrootfstype is fine how it is. If your root file system is on /dev/sda1 then your bootpart is 0:1 and your mmcroot is /dev/sda1.

Regardless I was upgrading due to some strange behavior with an spidev device and made it far enough to realize that the capemgr support is gone. Since I need to make changes to the device tree I’ll have to find another way forward.

Thanks for your help

armhf

The TI page was for reference on the subject (two partition instructions lower on the page). The main point is that MLO should load u-boot.img and show u-boot at the console. Since you don’t see this you have an issue with the FAT partition, MLO, and u-boot and a retry should get it working (although it certainly is nearly identical to the old u-boot, so it probably is not worth changing since you have a working card now).

The capemanager support not being ported forward from 3.8 yet is not so great, but hand-editing the device tree isn’t too bad either if that is an option for you.

How can I stop excessive dhclient logs on latest Unbuntu Trusty image?
I have tried modifying the /etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf file to include “dhclient.none” but the response when restarting the rsyslog service reponds with [rsyslogd-3000: unknown facility name “dhclient”] but the process tree indicates dhclient as a valid process?
This used to work with the earlier ubuntu releases but maybe there have been some recent changes I am not aware of?
thanks

armhf

Are any dhcp interfaces defined in /etc/network/interfaces? What happens if you comment them out?

German

Hi,
Yes I have dhcp configure in /etc/network/interfaces {iface eth0 inet dhcp} because I am using it and as far as I know it is required .. however I would like to simply get rid of the persistent logging of dhclient logs to the /var/log/syslog file (also the rsyslogd stuff)?
Previously I would add “dhclient.none” to the /etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf to stop the unnecessary logging (because I am using syslog to to log my application data and don’t want a lot of unnecessary stuff there) – this worked before but not with the latest image?

armhf

More of a general Linux question, but that doesn’t seem like it should have changed. Syntax error? Can you post the contents of that file?

German

Yes, probably a Linux issue. Every few minutes the dhclient fills up the syslog file with this:

ubuntu-armhf dhclient: DHCPREQUEST of 192.168.0.22 on eth0 to 192.168.0.1 port 67 (xid=0x2f040bac)
ubuntu-armhf dhclient: DHCPACK of 192.168.0.22 from 192.168.0.1
ubuntu-armhf dhclient: bound to 192.168.0.22 — renewal in 1428 seconds.
and I would like to stop it?
This is what the main parts of my /etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf file looks like.

Any idea why there is a dash in front of the /var/log/syslog path? Maybe worth a try without it?

KissCool

hi have you receive the TI eval kit to help me ?

armhf

The board is in — should be able to get to it over the weekend.

armhf

Based on another report above, it seems that there may have been an issue with uEnv.txt. The bone-uboot file has been updated if you want to try it again.

German

I managed to filter out the unwanted dhclient syslog messages by adding the following lines to the /etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf file:
:msg, contains, “DHCPACK” stop
:msg, contains, “bound” stop

This is a rather inefficient method but it works ok?

German

When ubuntu boots up and promps, or when syslog messages are logged it always prefixes the prompt line with “Username”@unbuntu-armhf” .. is there a easy way to change the “ubuntu-armhf” wording ? I am using the syslog messages for an application and would rather display something else.

armhf

Change the hostname in /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts.

armhf

Did this work for you?

Luis Montenegro Ferrel

Hi Armhf, Thank you for your feed-back. I did try this and it worked beautifully! However, my next break wall that I have hit – is that I am following the recipe here: http://www.armhf.com/boards/beaglebone-black/bbb-sd-install/, on how to create a partition of a micro sd card and mounting a linux distro from a list. I believe that I followed the instructions very closely and didn’t miss anything. Hence, when I went to fire up my BBB with the inserted micro SD card, and connected to my monitor using a VGA cable to the BBB. Very shortly, I got on the monitor screen for about 2 seconds a black screen with the linux logo on the upper left-hand corner of the screen, than lost the boot screen and signal. I was wondering if I am missing something or a sequence. Thanks for any feed-back!

armhf

The images here are tested in the headless configuration, so it is possible there could be a video issue with 3.14. Can you still ssh into the board even though the display goes out? On a separate thread below, there seems to be an issue with the AM335x Starter Kit (TMDSSK3358) LCD and the 3.14 kernel. If you want to give the 3.12 TI SDK kernel a shot for reference, the instructions are reposted here:

Dear sir, i have update our BBB with Ubuntu Trusty 14.10 as above instruction into my 8G SD card, but when i connected to HDMI, i can see the system boot from SD, why i can not use Putty same as the sytem inside the MMC? means when boot from SD card, i can not use USB line connected to BBB and then use Putty on Windows7 with IP 192.168.7.2 port 22 same like MMC which can be used correctly. How should i change any part to SD card system and then it can be used by USB line to windows with Putty. thank you very much!

Let us know how it works for you and we can add it as an example entry in the next image update.

German

Power Fail Interrupt? Is there some way to detect power fail in order to safely shutdown the BBB if power is interrupted. Generally the BBB (running ubuntu trusty image) recovers ok after a power fail but boot time seems longer. As I understand the BBB will actually run OK until the 5V power reaches 3.3V ? If so is there a power fail detection & interrupt system (or Linux SIGNAL) on BBB generated that can automatically shutdown in a safe manner?

Thanks I will look into your suggestions on file systems, but one of the main reasons I need this facility is that my application logs data to a sqlite database on a regular basis and I need to ensure file integrity if power fails. That said I have found that the ext4 file system is very reliable and will recover on almost all failures.
Monitoring the output on the internal voltage regular probably will probably not be fast enough unless you can monitor the input side of the regulator and do this with some kind of daemon running in the back ground.

I was thinking more along lines of using the internal comparator to monitor the input 5V supply to the regulator and trigger an interrupt which would send a Linux signal to a daemon to shut down safely, but not exactly sure on how to go about this or how fast a response time could be achieved?

KissCool

you are the best now it works fine.
now I must change the screen size because the image is to big
do you know how we do that

Martin

I installed the Ubuntu Trusty 14.04 image. I noticed that the typical log files, such as “/var/log/auth.log” are missing. I seems that owner of the directory /var/log is set to “root:crontab”. After doing

Thanks for your answers,
we installed lxde desktop. We have troubles on the lxde login screen. This screen seems to small. we have a blue background and a white logging label.
Do you know how I can change the resolution for this screen ?

We have another problem, when we use the touchscreen this cursor go to the opposite way.
When I click on top right corner the display my cursor moves to the bottom left corner.

Do you have a idea to setup the axes ?

KissCool

can you said me where we can find the source of the TI Kernel 3.12
thanks

KissCool

Hi
I follow the TI wiki to compile a kernel with the sdk. But I didn’t find how to deploy it on my SDCard.
Thanks

ClemGarfield

Hi everyone,

I’m new in linux embedded development and i looking for some help to create a root file system.
Could you tell where i can find a good tutorial about it ?

Just copy the same files found in the .tar supplied above. If you want to make it easy, you probably only need the files found in /boot and any kernel modules you might have added.

Andrei No

Hello everyone,
I have an issue with Ubuntu 14.04 versus Ubuntu 13.10
I have a BeagleBone-Black rev.B and i use a RTL WIFI dongle rtl8192cu
The Wifi is a cheap RTL8188cus dongle similar to http://www.adafruit.com/products/814
The firmware used is rtlwifi/rtl8192cufw_TMSC.bin

For Ubuntu 13.10 the SSH connection from Windows or Ubuntu was reliable and was not disconnecting…
Upgrade using: ubuntu-trusty-14.04-rootfs-3.14.4.1-bone-armhf.com.tar.xz (June 3, 2014)

The location of the WIFI router is less than <10m indoors.
The Ethernet connection works fine.
In Ubuntu 13.10 i wasn't having this issue, but the reboot to SDCard was not possible until USER button is pressed.
That inconvenience led to follow procedure to Ubuntu 14.04 so that problem is resolved.

My guess is that the problem has to do with the RTL WIFI dongle is not fully compatible with 14.04
( seem to work with 13.10 … )

I was trying to compile the drivers for RTL WIFI but i dont know how to install linux headers from xz arhive
linux-headers-3.14.4.1-bone-armhf.com.tar.xz (June 3, 2014) i couldn't find a usable tutorial for BBB :(

My resolve for that issue was to copy RTL WIFI firmware drivers from 13.10 to 14.04 because stock 14.04 drivers would not work for my RTL WIFI dongle, don't know why. But maybe that produces the problem ?

http://www.armhf.com John Clark

The 3.14 kernel is pretty bleeding-edge and qn issue with wifi could very likely. The 13.10 image is based on the more-stable 3.8 kernel. Check out the dmesg log to see if there is anything in there you can use to google with.

ClemGarfield

Hello everyone,

I’m using
the TI AM335x starter kit and I have some troubles with it.

I’m running
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and I installed icewm. My problem is that my display is
inversted (180° rotation). I would like to rotate it and I read in the net I have
to use x –configure and modify the generate xorg.conf file.

But when I
use x –configure, I have this result:

No devices
to configure. Configuration failed

Can anyone
help me ?

Best regards

armhf

Do you see /dev/fb0?

ClemGarfield

yes, I can see /dev/fb0.

armhf

Have you tried using the framebuffer to rotate the display 180 degrees?

echo 2 > /sys/class/graphics/fb0/rotate

ClemGarfield

I try this command but nothing happen

Oussema HARBI

Hi Pavel,
Any news about this ?

http://3dairspace.org.uk Lloyd Bailey

Hi, Do you have an image file so I can dd (flash) it to the board?

Hiro

Hi,
Im student in Japan and Im trying to use beaglebone black for my research.
yesterday, i flashed debian wheezy to my microSD and hopefully i could turn on debian on my BBB.
but now, i want to know the password for superuser(“su”). also, im wondering what is linux headers which is shown at the attempt of debian on this page.
if somebody have those answers, please tell me.

Kind regards,

armhf

To become the root user type sudo su and then when prompted, use the same password that you used to login.

anilsson

Hi, I’m reposting this question. Does anyone have problems sudo as ubuntu user? I am booting off the sd card using the trusty tahr image, and I can log in using the “ubuntu” username, but that user does not have sudo rights. Did something get corrupted? Is that user supposed to be able to sudo out of the box? I must be missing something obvious here. Thanks, and any ideas will be much appreciated.

armhf

There is no known problem with the image in this area. Can you copy/paste the output from the terminal which shows the steps you take to make this happen?

anilsson

Hi, Thanks for looking into this.

Here’s the output:
ubuntu@ubuntu-armhf:~$ sudo apt-get update
sudo: /usr/bin/sudo must be owned by uid 0 and have the setuid bit set

Hi
I noticed you have updated UBOOT bone-uboot.tar.xz (July 17, 2014) against the original June 3 version?
Can you please clarify the changes made as these may be cause of some random problems I am experiencing with the original June 3 issue such as :

1. Problems with erratic console terminal behaviour ?
2. Problems with failure to boot up properly after power on?

thanks

armhf

It was #2 — the boot order logic when a non-bootable SD card was present.

German

Thanks John,

The erratic boot up I am experiencing may be due to power supply ramp up, according to other people on the web?

Concerning the Watchdog on the Latest Unbuntu 14.04 Trusty image. The watchdog appears to work OK and I can operate the watchdog by writing to /dev/watchdog device but I cannot seem to stop the watchdog operation by “closing” the device /dev/watchdog?
According to the procedure the watchdog timer can be turned off by simply closing the /dev/watchdog unless the linux kernel is configured with the ” WATCHDOG_NOWAY_OUT” option which supposedly is located in the /etc/watchdog.conf file which doesn’t appear in your image?
I cannot see any watchdog set up instructions in the uEnv.txt uboot file?
Also Ideally I would like to change the default time out (60 sec) to some other value?

German

Thanks for that, can I simply update the uEnv.txt file to do this or do I need to make a new image?

armhf

Exactly: only uEnv.txt needs to be changed to make it the same.

German

Correction, turning off watchdog does work. Now need to figure out how to change time period or find a configuration file somewhere? Anyone know what /dev/watchdog0 is used for?

Andrew

Hello you can use the below commands to install the headers from this website intro youre linux

I have a BBB runnuning ubuntu armhf. It has been running well for months and then all of a sudden it can’t boot from SD card anymore. I can boot from eMMC but when it trys to boot from SD card I just get the user LED0 blinking.

Thoughts?

armhf

Could the SD card could have gone bad? Run a fsck on it while booted from the eMMC.

matt

been running fsk for 40 minutes and it is stuck it seams. Output is as follows:

hi guys. im a beginner..and im kinda stuck here with ubuntu 14.01(trusty) with the beaglebone black. anyone can gimmie a link of how to get the BBB work along with the ROS(robot operating system) with the BBB(beaglebone black) in ubuntu. really appreciate for help..

patsuhiko

Hello,
i have a problem with the FT230X USB-Serial Converter. In the >3.2 Kernel there should be the ftdi_sio but in my actual Wheezy 3.8.13 i can’t get the chip to work… dmesg shows the new device with the data, but don’t load the ftdi_sio and i don’t get a /dev/ttyUSBx
Has anyone a solution for my problem?
Thank you

Thomas

I’ve followed the instructions above and have ubuntu 14.04 running on my BBB, however I am no longer able to ssh to the BBB over usb on IP 192.168.1.7, I am able to access it if I hook up ethernet to a router and ssh across the network but this not not desired. What do i need to do to be able to ssh through usb again?

Thomas

I actually just finished this a week or so ago, the instructions above work well for getting 14.04 on on the BBB and follow the ROS sight for installation on ARMHF

MihaiM

Hy for a lot of commands there is need for root password (shutdown, fdisk, etc) I am using Ubuntu image. Please can you provide the root password or a method for this problem (like change the root password) Thank you

armhf

sudo su

MihaiM

Thank you

chory

Hi guys,

The ubuntu image “ubuntu-trusty-14.04-rootfs-3.14.4.1-bone-armhf.com.tar.xz (June 3, 2014)” is for flashing eMMC or it can be used to boot ubuntu from SD. I just want to keep my debian on eMMC and would like to try ubuntu 14.04

Regards,
Chohry

armhf

Just follow the instructions to build an uSD card that can be booted externally.

I have the same problem with Ubuntu 12.04. Then I plug in USB cable nothing didn’t happen. I tried to connect my BBB to linux and windows OS, there no difference.
I can connect via ethernet cable, and login on BBB, but I need do the same by USB cable…

http://carsonevans.ca/ Carson Evans

What happened to the bootable images? I only have access to a windows machine that I cannot mess with.

Few months ago I downloaded and installed Ubuntu Trusty 14.04 in my BeagleBone (White) as it is explained in this site, and it has been working correctly since then. Nowadays I’m trying to cross compile the kernel and deploy it to the board, but I’m afraid I don’t know exactly how to do this. I must recognize I’m not an expert cross-compiling kernels, so any help will be apreciated.

I’ve cloned the kernel sources from github in https://github.com/beagleboard/linux.git, and changed to branch 3.14, as it is the version Ubuntu Trusty comes with. Once met the required tools, I proceed with the compilation:

I’m not sure about the steps to follow to deploy the resulting image, not even if what I’ve done was partly right. I’ve tried replacing zImage, System.map, and also deploying the results of make modules_install, but every attempt has resulted in an error.

I know that the information I’m requesting could be very generic for someone who is used to deal with these kind of issues, but my knowledge about kernel compilation and deployment is rather poor and for every attempt I do I need to spend a lot of time. So, synthetizing, my question would be the following:

Which is the procedure to cross compile and deploy the kernel 3.14.X to the BeagleBone, which has been previously industrialized with Ubuntu Trusty 14.04 (kernel 3.14.4.1-bone-armhf.com) as depicted in this web site?

Lots of thanks in advance.

armhf

The kernel can be compiled right on the BeagleBone making cross-compiling unnecessary. All of the kernels on this site are not cross-compiled — they are compiled on a quad code wandboard. Instructions for compiling natively can be found here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Kernel/Compile

alukardx

Ok, I’ll try to adapt and reproduce these steps during this week. In a few days I’ll report if I could compile and deploy the kernel natively. Thanks again.

alukardx

Hi,

Finally I’ve managed to run a new cross-compiled kernel with the Ubuntu image in this site. I’ve cloned Robert Nelson’s kernel (https://github.com/RobertCNelson/bb-kernel/), changed to branch 3.14, and executed “build_kernel.sh”. Although the process takes more than hour, it is almost automathic and prepares the set of files in a separate directory (./deploy) containing zImage, dtbs, modules, config and System.map. I’ve just had to deploy these files to the microSD and reboot. That is what I was looking for.

Thank you anyway for your suggestion.

Shin

Hi, I’m Japanese BeagleBone Body.
Who can please tell me how to get the solution ?
I had run Debian Wheezy 7.5 which was booted from my microSD card.

I have forgot my administrative user password. It is the only user account on the server.
Then I can’t log into the Debian in ssh and tty0.

Sorry for my bad Linux knowledge, but How to use your linux-headers-3.14.4.1-bone-armhf.com.tar.xz
Any help would be appreciated.
Best Regards
Loi Dang

ewit

Hi – first thanks for the great site! However, I am a bit of a newbie and I am trying to use 4 serial ports on my BeagleBone Black. I need to use ttyO1 – ttyO4. I was able to use these ports on 3.8.13 using the Capemgr. However, due to the interrupt bug on 3.8 I had to switch to 3.14 – which doesn’t have capemgr support. I decided to use your image and it boots perfectly and runs well. Except… that I can only access ttyO1. Is there a way to access the other three ports? What about if I need to use other GPIOs (like for a RTC or something)? Please talk slowly for me, I am just a stupid scientist – not a linux guru. Cheers!

armhf

Check the existing overlays in /lib/firmware as there may be serial overlays there by default now. If not, what is the output from dmesg?

mike

If your booting from microSD. I would mount the microSD on another machine and then edit the /etc/passwd file (simply remove the x).

calzon65

I’ve been using your distro on my BBB for about a year and am quite happy, thank you for this site.
With the new Raspberry Pi2 using ARMv7, if you ever acquire a Pi2, I hope to see a distro for the Pi2 on this website. Sorry to post this in the BBB thread, but I could not find a general thread.

DarkKnight

I have loaded the image to SD card and i am able to boot to ubuntu from SD card . But i am not able to find ip address of my BeagleBone Black . i tried ifconfig but i didnt see USB0 related settings . Some one kindly help

armhf

it will be eth0

mcg1103

I have ubuntu running on my bbb via the sd card. How can I get ubuntu running from the emmc flash on the board?

When booted from the external uSD, the internal eMMC will be: /dev/mmcblk1

Anywhere the instructions reference /dev/sdX use/dev/mmcblk1 instead.

i.e. fdisk /dev/mmcblk1

When you get to the partitioning steps it will be p1 and p2

i.e. mkfs.vfat /dev/mmcblk1p1

and mkfs.ext4 /dev/mmcblk1p2

mcg1103

Thanks! I will give this a try.

RickB

I see you have img file for ubuntu-saucy-13.10-armhf-3.8.13-bone30.img.xz. Any chance you have one for ubuntu-trusty-14.04?

ifmx4ever

Hello. i am running Ubuntu 14.04 on my BBB. uname -a shows Linux arm 3.14.33-ti-r50 #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Feb 12 03:52:59 UTC 2015 armv71 armv71 armv71 GNU/Linux. I am using BBB along with Opensprinkler h/w to control irrigation to my landscape irrigation valves. I was to irrigate my yard on demand rather than go by a set schedule. I also installed drivers for TP Link TL-WN725N based on instructions from http://coremega.tumblr.com/post/78194792401/install-tp-link-wireless-n-adapter-tl-wn725n-on. My issue is that if I do not access the BBB for a day or so, I am unable to ping or run my irrigation program or connect to the BBB via ssh. ssh times out. Ping fails. If I go to the location where my unit is hooked up, unplug the power and plug it back in – everything returns to normal. When it is hung, I cannot see the blinking heart beat led. But the power led is on. The BBB is powered by the open sprinkler h/w. This h/w takes 25V A/C (as the irrigation valves requires that it be A/C), and it drives the BBB by giving it the power it needs 5V DC. If I dismantle the connections and bring it indoors, the unit runs for days without issues. Any thing I can check for?